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Happy book deal news! (TINY book deal news…sorry so small! Click to enlarge!)

So, if you saw the announcement of my recent sale to Riptide, you might be interested in the longer version of the story, which is also, functionally, an update on my 2017 publishing schedule. Many of you know bits and pieces of this, but here’s the full story.

I’m super excited to announce the FAMOUS books!

In May 2017 (exact date TBA), I’ll be independently publishing book 1, FAMOUS, a m/f novel about a mega-famous pop star having an existential crisis who bolts from her manager and ends up hiding out with a nerdy art history professor in a small Iowa college town. (Could Totally Happen.)

On November 28, 2017, Riptide will publish book 2, INFAMOUS, a m/m novel about a bad-boy rock star and a workaholic doctor who both have really good reasons to stay away from each other (we all know how that’s gonna end, yes?).

Each book is a true standalone—there are no overlapping characters—operating at the intersection of romance and fame. For now, there are only two books in this series, but I hope to expand it (boy band reunion on a cruise ship, anyone?). I just need to figure out how to manipulate space and time to make this happen.

This series is mixed in two ways. First, it mixes m/f romance and m/m romance. If you’re familiar with my 49th Floor series from Entangled, you’ll know that I like my romance to reflect real life—because internationally famous pop stars hiding out in small Iowa towns are a dime a dozen. Ha. No, because, you know, there are lots of different kinds of people in the world, and they all deserve implausible brush-with-fame happily ever afters.

But this is also a mixed traditionally- and independently-pubbed series. I have to give major, major props to Riptide for being cool with publishing a book that’s part of a series that includes books they aren’t publishing. A lot of series end up being mixed trad- and indie-pubbed when a publisher drops an author, or when a trad publisher and an author agree on something like a free novella, but this one is planned from the outset as a joint endeavour, and I’m really proud of and excited by that prospect. Because I enjoy irritating people with businessspeak jargon, I’m going to call this a “win-win.” I think by doing it this way, the series will reach more readers.

(I would also be remiss if I didn’t stop here and give a shout-out to my agent, Courtney Miller-Callihan, who did not blink an eye when I said, “Hey, I want to do a series that’s part indie and part traditional and then went out and thought about all the stuff I hadn’t like, oh, for example, how the hell to handle the subrights.)

So, there you go! That’s my 2017 schedule. In 2018, I have three books coming out from Grand Central Forever and one other standalone from Riptide as part of their Queering the Classics series. Those deals were announced quite a while ago, but now that the books are actually in production, I’ll do a little 2018 update post soon—stay tuned!

Here’s half of Audra’s face that one time we drove two hours with an Ikea box shoved between our heads. It was like being in confession. Except there was nothing to say because she already knew it all.

So, my friend Audra North and I send each other a lot of emails. Like, A LOT of emails. We decided that it was a good idea to start transcribing our emails for your entertainment. (I’m not really sure why we decided that, but here we are.) So without further ado, I present you the first installment in what I hope will become a series.

AudraWhat do you think of these covers? *attaches covers-in-progress for forthcoming series* The placement of the title in the last one seems off. But I don’t know if I’m just looking at these all wonky because they’ve been in front of me for so long.

JennyI like them! I liked the closed-eyes kissing thing across the group of them. I am not the person to ask about technical things like fonts and shit, though. Want me to ask Mr. Holiday? Did I ever tell you he used to be a designer?

AudraI’ll probably sleep on the design and fiddle with it tomorrow. If Mr. Holiday has thoughts and wants to share them I’m happy to get them, but only if he really wants to or doesn’t care. As long as you don’t look at them and go OH MY GODRA NO then I know I’m close to the final version.

I’m pretty sure I’m going to take a Nyquil again tonight. I did last night because I was so stuffy and sneezy. But the thing is…I love Nyquil. I love it so much so I regulate it like crazy. Maybe once a year I’ll take half a dose for two or three nights and that’s it because it makes me feel so good. Danger Will Robinson.

JennyOh I know all about this. When I was in college, I once had a wicked head cold during finals and I discovered Theraflu. It was the only thing that allowed me to sleep. My cold went away, and I kept drinking a cup of it at night. I was like, well, it’s finals, I need all the help I can get. Then I ran out, and sure enough, that night I could not sleep. I was up, dressed, and in the elevator down to the parking lot to go and get more (I HAVE A FINAL AT 8 AM!!!), when I was like WHOA, WHOA, I have to stop this now. So I did. But to this day, I do enjoy the sleep I get when I am sick and I take night time cold meds. Then a few years later, I had to get an endoscopy and they gave me an IV of Valium and Demerol, and I was so happy it was scary. I said to Mr. Holiday, who was picking me up in his “friend” capacity (we weren’t dating yet) that I was never allowed to have those drugs again. To the extent that when they tried to give me Tylenol 3 for my week 12 miscarriage, I refused it because I thought it was a bad road to go down, knowing I would be very depressed afterwards and in possession of a bottle of T3. My point is: Mmmmm, narcotics.

AudraFriend Mr. Holiday picked you up from an endoscopy. Sweet.

I got my wisdom teeth out at 16 and got laudanum afterward. I took one. It was insanely amazing. As soon as I woke up from my trippy happy laudanum nap, I threw away the entire bottle. So I hope no junkie was going through my trash the next day because whoa. There were like 50 of those suckers left. But the way I loved it scared me shitless.

I have this mental play of Mr. Holiday that I sometimes run through when you’re talking about him. It’s where we three are sitting, playing cards, and he has a secret code while he plays and it’s basically him saying cutting sarcastic things in a gentle way. And then he wins the card game with his secret code (which is just him talking, which makes no sense because we’re all playing against each other, but somehow in my mind it makes sense). After the game is over, he sweeps up all the cards and stacks them neatly and tells us about how the Native Americans used to burn bison dung for fuel in the winter.

JennyOMG, I love you so much.

AudraI realized that sounded like I was being mean. I meant I was thinking about asking him about burning dung as a fuel source for the house (totally jokingly) because that was also super efficient and then I decided against it since he doesn’t know me well and might have thought I was either being mean or totally serious. And then he’d have to feel awkward while he said gentle sarcastic things to find out if I was actually trying to convince y’all to burn poo.

Anyway. Mr. Holiday is great. That is my overall message.

JennyLOL! In no way did I take that message as mean! It was bizarrely, delightfully you and I loved it. And he is unnaturally obsessed with light bulb efficiency, so really, is dung burning that far off?

THE NEXT MORNING…

JennyI’m sorry I never showed your covers to Mr. Holiday. He fell asleep while lying down with the kid and slept the whole night there!

How was your Nyquil?

AudraThe Nyquil was awesome and now I shall stop taking them. Because it was just so so nice.

And no worries! I’m going to go ahead with these covers. Looking at them again in the light of day, they’re good enough, so it’s lock and load time.

What’s the story for today? What are you working on?

JennyArtie and Dawn all day.

Except oh shit, I just remembered I owe a post to my publicist by the end of the day. I can’t think of anything to say. I have nothing. Can I write about my love for you and/or night time cold meds?

Audra

Um…can you imagine what that post would be like, if you wrote about how much you love what is effectively a drug?

I will give you $10 to do it.

JennyAnd I will use that $10 to be like, “One commenter will win a pack of Theraflu!”

AudraAnd then you could get a Theraflu spokesperson contract. It might compete with your Maybelline one.

JennyOr maybe the deal can be that Maybelline is so reliable that you can go on a Theraflu bender and STILL have great lashes.

Which reminds me, there was something in your book I was beta reading yesterday that made me laugh because it was totes similar to something in Artie and Dawn. But now I can’t remember what it was. I’ll just have to be surprised when you launch your lawsuit.

AudraWell, you have the upper hand of knowing what it is already so you could preemptively file your lawsuit pre-publication, even.

And good point: bender + lashes are not mutually exclusive.

Probably our voices will start to blend over time and then we’ll be able to write a joint book involving a one-armed man, a castrated duke, a redhead named Meredith, and a camping trip. It will be epic. Sylvia Day will ask us to ghost write her next series. We will refuse because we will be richer than Bill Gates, who will read our books in public.

Is it me? Or is it Rose? (It’s me.) Groom cropped out to protect the innocent.

The Engagement Game, book 3 in my 49th Floor Series, is out today! Yay! I love this book so hard! It’s definitely my favourite of the trilogy, but, oddly, it was the hardest to write. Took me the longest, needed the most intensive editing, and generally drove me the bat-shittiest! I sometimes wonder if that’s why I love it more, but I honestly don’t think so. I just think it’s the best book of the three. Why? Heck if I know. (I would make a bad critic: I’m not very good at talking about books, other than to note the way they make me feel.)

The book I hated and then loved.

It’s been a big week because in addition to having a book out, I also:

1. Went to see Taylor Swift in concert.

2. Eloped! Aka, had a super secret surprise wedding that no one knew about!

Ha! And I did both of those things in the same afternoon, practically back-to-back, with a quick stop for dinner and a change of clothes in between.

In other words, it was perfect.

But something funny occurred to me on the train ride home: the outfit I wore to my wedding was exactly the same as one worn by Rose Verma, the heroine of The Engagement Game. And this was NOT on purpose—at least not consciously-on-purpose.

In the book, Rose is on a mission to find a boyfriend—she has a deadline of sorts—so she’s internet dating with a vengeance. Between her serial dates and attending lots of high society events with the book’s hero, with whom she’s entered into a bit of an unholy alliance, she’s often dressed to the nines. Unlike me, Rose is quite a fashionista. I, when I’m not taking part in secret wedding ceremonies, am usually wearing leggings and sweatshirts.

But we do have one thing in common, which is that we like bright colours. Rose, because she has so many events and dates to attend, goes through many consume changes: emerald green dresses, blue-and-silver ballgowns—you name it. One of her outfits—one the hero takes special note of as she heads out on her date, is an electric blue dress with red heels. Now, I don’t wear heels as a matter of principle, the principle being that I enjoy not suffering. But other than that, check me out! I’m wearing Rose’s outfit!

Yep, I am wearing the same outfit as the heroine of my romance novel. It was an accident!

I think? Probably this is the part where we should call in the psychologists, but I’m going to stick with “accident.”

Well, here’s some news: I just signed a deal to add a fourth book to my 49th Floor series published by Entangled’s Indulgence imprint. You know the one with the wounded, cranky, rich CEO dudes who think they aren’t interested in relationships?

And guess what? Book 4, called His Heart’s Revenge, is going to feature not one, but TWO wounded, cranky, rich CEO dudes who think they aren’t interested in relationships. Yep, I’m crashing the m/m romance novel party!

I’m super excited about this for a bunch of reasons.

1. I love reading series where the sexual orientation of the characters varies. You know, JUST LIKE REAL LIFE. Throw a bunch of wounded, cranky, rich CEO dudes into a room and one or two of them is bound to be gay, no?

2. The 49th Floor series is set in my beloved Toronto. The UN calls Toronto the most diverse city in the world. That’s why not everyone in the series is white. You know, JUST LIKE REAL LIFE. Now, not everyone in the series is straight, either.

3. I love that an established category romance imprint is publishing this book. When you write category romances, you’re generally more limited in what you can do—you’ve signed on to write a book that comes with a pre-existing brand. There are rules of the universe, so to speak (which is part of why I love category romance as a reader and as a writer, but that’s another post). I wonder if part of the reason you don’t see a lot of queer category romance is because in addition to imprint-specific rules, we generally take for granted, in established mainstream imprints, that we’re getting a man and a woman. I have to give a big shout out to Entangled here. (Did you know they accept m/m and f/f submissions in all their imprints?) I was also quite delighted, when I was going back and forth with the proposal for this book, that I got some (minor) pushback on a few issues. For example, one plot point required one of the characters to do something that was deemed not in keeping with an Indulgence hero. I love that. (I’m weird that way in general—I love being edited. But I also super-loved that in this case, category tropes were being scrupulously applied, regardless of sexual orientation.)

So, are you ready for TWO Indulgence heroes? His Heart’s Revenge isn’t done yet, but I can tell you that our heroes both work in the financial sector. One is an established bank CEO, and the other is an upstart launching his own private wealth management firm. (If you read my forthcoming book 3 in the 49th Floor Series, The Engagement Game, you’ll recognize our upstart hero as Marcus’s cousin Cary.) They’re in competition for a huge client, and our established CEO is Not. Losing. To. That. Punk. Partly as a matter of pride (he’s an Indulgence hero, after all), but partly because it’s personal. Yes, they have history. Which means some revenge is gonna rear its ugly head. And also: they are forced to go camping together. (Don’t you hate it when that happens?)

Big thanks and high fives to editors extraordinaire at Entangled, Tracy Montoya and Heather Howland, to my friend and former editor Gwen Hayes for match-making me with this project, and of course to my agent and friend and tireless advocate, Courtney Miller-Callihan.

The Likelihood of Lucy, book 2 in my Regency Reformers series, released yesterday! In keeping with the “rules” of the series, we have a spy (that would be Trevor, and he’s pretty tortured), and an ahead-of-her-time reformer (that would be Lucy, and she’s a devotee of the feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft). If you want to check out the first chapter, or find a link to your preferred bookstore, pop on over here (you can access the giveaway through any of the blog stops).

My publisher is sponsoring a couple tours. First, today only, Goddess Fish Promotions is hosting a book blast. You can visit some (or all!) of the stops and enter to win a $25 Amazon gift card.

For the next two weeks, Sizzling PR is hosting a blog tour. There’s a $25 gift card associated with this one, too. Stop by and check out the posts, or enter here:

So I have a new book out today, and I’m supposed to write a blog post about it because that’s what one does. But instead I thought I’d write one about Taylor Swift. It’s not actually that much of a stretch because there are shades of Taylor Swift in my new book. Amy, my heroine, looks a lot like Taylor (in fact, she even talked herself into a club once when the bouncer mistook her for her celebrity doppelganger). And when she’s dumped in spectacular fashion at the beginning of the book, she wishes she had Taylor’s ability to chancel her heartbreak into sly songs about her exes, converting breakups into platinum records. And then of course there’s an epic scene in the book in which Amy and her girlfriends do karaoke to “Long Live,” which might be my all-time fave Tay song.

If you know me, or you follow me on Twitter, none of this is a surprise because you already know that I am a superfan. What can I say? I have that kind of celebrity crush on her where I feel like we could be BEST FRIENDS, if only she’d give me a chance. Except in this case, I also feel sort of maternal. I get really excited when she succeeds, and I’m thrilled by her current “girlfriends before boys” phase. So it’s like she’s a cross between my imaginary best friend and my imaginary daughter. (I hasten to add, though, that my imaginary pregnancy with my imaginary daughter happened in my teen years. My EARLY teen years.)

But why? Why am I such a superfan? People ask me this a lot. The obvious answer is that I love her music. It’s clever and infectious, and it makes me happy. But when I interrogate that sentiment further and ask WHY I love her music so much, the answer I come up with is that Taylor Swift is a master of point of view.

Writers talk about point of view all the time. In a crude sense, point of view in a book is about who is narrating. Who knows what, and when do they know it? In many, but not all, romance novels, you get some of the story told from the point of view of the heroine and some from the point of view of the hero. The vogue in romance right now is something called deep point of view. Google it for a more detailed explanation, but basically, we’re talking about a filtering everything through a character. There is no omniscient narrator. For example, the hero walks into a room. Maybe it’s a room with a really cool decor. But if our hero is not an aesthete, not the kind of guy who notices that stuff, we as the readers cannot be told about the teal antique Persian rug over the glossy walnut-stained hardwood. It might be there, but if he doesn’t notice it, we don’t get to know about it. But by seeing everything through his eyes, we get to know more about him as a character. We get a richer, more immersive experience of these characters, and hence of the story. (And if that rug is important, our heroine will have to remark on it later. Or our hero will have to spill his drink on it. Or something.)

Taylor Swift has always been really good at deep point of view. Earlier in her career, I always said that I liked her music because she wrote songs that sounded like songs a teenager would write. She captured an experience I remembered well. Many of her songs reminded me of stuff I would write in my diary. “Fifteen” is about being fifteen. “Mean” captures perfectly the experience of being bulled. Mind you, I didn’t love all her songs from this era. Some of them seemed a little melodramatic to me. But, perhaps counter-intuitively, I liked that. Being a teenager IS melodramatic.

(As an aside, I also think it’s telling that unlike many of her peers, the Taylor Swift of this era didn’t seem to be in any huge rush to grow up, to present as more mature than her actual years. Lots of moms I knew liked this about her because, in a hypersexual culture that fetishizes women’s bodies, they appreciated that their daughters had a role model who wasn’t playing this game.)

So what I’m saying is that Taylor Swift was a teenager writing about being a teenager. It’s simple, really, even though it’s kind of revolutionary.

And here’s why: At the same time she was mastering deep point of view, she was simultaneously the omniscient narrator of her own life. She had a perspective that was really rather amazing, both in general, but also given her youth. She was a teenager, yes, and perfectly capturing that experience, but part of the reason she was so perfectly capturing it was because she somehow knew what it was going to be like later when she was no longer a teenager. She had the wisdom or imagination or the something to know that her point of view was fleeting. That is some serious zen shit. People spend years in yoga and/or therapy trying to get there.

As an example, think about the song “Mean.” On the one hand she’s all:

You, with your switching sides
And your wildfire lies and your humiliation
You have pointed out my flaws
as if I don’t already see them
I walk with my head down…

We’ve all been there, right? (Well, I have!)

But in the same song, she steps back and says:

Someday, I’ll be living in a big old city
And all you’re ever gonna be is mean

She goes on to imagine her tormenter years from now, drunk in a bar, ranting on with no one listening. She’s doing deep point of view, but she’s also the omniscient narrator. Brilliant.

Or take my favourite song, “Long Live.”

It’s one of those songs where it’s hard to tell exactly what it’s about, but in a good way that lets you project onto it. To me, it seems to be about either a couple or a pair of friends getting away with something, playing a prank and reveling in their own success. It’s anthemic and delightfully defiant. But there’s also a built in sense of loss in the song as the narrator instructs herself to “remember this feeling.” And in the same breath that she asks her companion to promise that they’ll be together forever (you can practically see the pinky-swears) she’s telling him to show his future children pictures of her.

I’ve been talking about her early songs, but of course Taylor is not a teenager anymore. But she’s kept up with the perspective shifting, though it’s gotten more sophisticated.

“Out of the Woods” is a master class in this sense. Unlike in “Mean,” where she’s mostly shifting perspectives between verse and chorus, here she is doing both things at once all the time, infusing the whole song with this dual point of view.

We were built to fall apart
Then fall back together
Your necklace hanging from my neck
The night we couldn’t quite forget
When we decided
To move the furniture so we could dance,
Baby, like we stood a chance
Two paper airplanes flying, flying, flying

I find the image of moving the furniture to dance so perfectly indelible. But at the same time, we know—because she knows—it’s fleeting. It isn’t going to last. The fleetingness that we only know because of her omniscient narrator perspective is infused in the moment that is so perfectly crystalized because of her deep point of view perspective.

But it’s not all serious! She’s gone delightfully and wackily meta in “Blank Space:”

“Cause we’re young and we’re reckless, we’ll take this way too far.”

And also, come on, I’m acting like we’re in grad school here. None of this would matter if she wasn’t also writing the catchiest, danciest pop songs known to humankind.

I love her. Mr. Holiday loves her (though I take the credit for slowly and determinedly converting him). My five-year-old son loves her. There has been many an early morning “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” dance party in my house. And perhaps less glibly, there has also been many a family dance party to “Stay,” which I maintain is one of the sweetest and most realistic love songs ever written.

So there you go. My ode to Tay, master of point of view. And, hey, maybe you want to buy my new book. It’s probably not as good as a Taylor Swift album, but I try.

I almost didn’t write this post. Then I almost didn’t post this post. I’m a newbie. I just published my first book a couple months ago. What the hell do I know? Mostly when the twitterverse explodes with some publishing controversy or other, I keep my mouth shut. But dang. I couldn’t help it.

1. I read all my reviews.
Yup. All of them. I admire authors who don’t read reviews. I want to be them when I grow up. I have a bunch more books coming out this year, and I hope that I won’t always be like this, that I’ll become uber busy and, I dunno, SUCCESSFUL, and I won’t care anymore. But I doubt it. I think it’s just the way I’m wired. I care what you think of me.

2. Sometimes, I read a review and I think, “Was this person on crack when she read my book?”
Did she even read my book? If she read a book, was it perhaps someone else’s and not mine?

3. When this happens, this is what I do.
I send the review to my writing friends and I say, what the everloving hell? And they say, what the everloving hell? And then I get over it. Because I have other shit to do.

4. When this happens, this is what I don’t do.

a) Contact the reviewer in any form up to and including stalking.
b) Write a blog post about it.
c) Respond in any way other than to send it to my friends and say what the everloving hell?

5. In fact, I don’t respond to reviews at all.
Sometimes, when I read a good review on a blog and there are some comments, I want to jump in to answer a question or something, but I DON’T DO IT. The only fashion in which I “respond” to reviews at all is when someone tweets at me that they reviewed my book. I usually say, “Thanks for reviewing!” or, if they liked it, “I’m glad you enjoyed!” I stress out about even this. But it seems rude to ignore someone tweeting at you when they took the time to review your book. So I err on the side of vague gratitude (which is underlain by real gratitude). Sarah Wendell gives a great conference session on this topic, and she’s funnier and more articulate than I am on this topic, so I encourage you to check her out if you ever have the chance.

6. I have become friends/friendly with some reviewers. Sometimes I worry about this.
But I think it’s inevitable. We like the same kinds of books: I write them, and they read them and review them. It’s a kind of self-selection: it’s bound to happen. I also think that if you’re worried about turning into Kathleen Hale, you’re probably not going to turn into Kathleen Hale. You might make some mistakes, but they’re gonna be smaller than hers.

7. I don’t think this means they owe me reviews on any subsequent books.

8. I don’t think this means they owe me positive reviews on any subsequent books.

9. I’m not going to say anything one way or the other if they do or do not review or do or do not like my subsequent books.

10. Because basically, I hang on to two first principles.

a) I wrote a book, but then I put it out into the world. I cannot control the world. (If I could control the world, I would not be writing books. Okay, yes I would.) The world is full of people who will not like my book. I cannot make them like my book. All I can do is send their reviews to my friends and say what the everloving hell? Sometimes this is hard, but you know what? So is being a grown up, yet I manage to do that every day—mostly.

b) I am so crazy-lucky that people are reading and reviewing my books.

This is not rocket science, people.

End rant.

Now because that was so heavy, here’s a picture of my boyfriend.

My boyfriend has not reviewed my books. But if he did, I would not respond. I would die, but I would not respond. I would die, but I would not respond. Photo by Ewen Roberts via Flickr Creative Commons.

Sandy’s shy. (Really. I know it’s hard to believe, but you try taking a picture of her.)

Once upon a time there was a girl named Jenny who liked to read romance novels. One day she thought, hey, maybe I should write a romance novel. How hard can it be, really?

Well, the gods heard that one, and after they finished laughing and doing some minor smiting of the prideful, they sent her a critique partner named Sandy.

Sandra Owens and I met in an online chapter of Romance Writers of America. We were both writing Regencies at the time—or trying to. We shared some opinions in common about that experience but I can’t tell you what they are OTHERWISE I WOULD HAVE TO KILL YOU. And I like to leave the suspense-writing to Sandy.

I’ve written before about the weird and awesome relationship that you develop with critique partners, about how you skip all the “real life” getting-to-know-you stuff and get right to the guts of things: you want to be a writer. Hi, you say, here’s this thing I wrote, tell me what’s wrong with it, and also, should I get a blog tour company for this next release or is that just a waste of money?

Sandy was the first person I practiced being a writer with, both technically, in terms of honing my craft, but also emotionally, in terms of ADMITTING I WANTED TO DO SOMETHING I MIGHT FAIL AT. I’ve said before, and I don’t think Sandy would disagree with me, that on paper, we don’t have that much in common. Our books are different, we live in different countries, we’re in different stages of life.

But it never mattered. (I guess it could have. We’ve both talked about what a relief it was to meet for the first time in person and actually, you know, LIKE each other. But I think we were always destined to end up with our feet propped up, drinking wine and talking about the fake worlds inside our heads.)

Sandy and I read each other’s “bad” books. (Hers is getting overhauled; mine will never see the light of day.) When we met each other, neither of us had any pubishing credentials and neither of us had an agent. One of us (not Sandy) might have been a little shaky on the concept of point of view.

Fast-forward a few years. Today, a funny thing happened.

It’s like we’re at the Olympics and we’re on the podium and there’s an American flag and a Canadian flag. I didn’t check who was #2. Probably the Ukrainians.

Yes, there we are, #1 and #3 in the Amazon romance series store. Dang. I rewrote this a thousand times because like most women, I’m socialized to be uncomfortable with self-praise, but I’m just going to say it. There was a lot of luck in there, for sure, and a kick-ass literary agent. But there was also a crapload of hard work.

This is the story of Danny, who is the best friend of Cassie, the heroine in my holiday novel Saving the CEO, which is book 1 in the 49th Floor series. You don’t need to have read Saving the CEO, though, to read this story—it works as a standalone.

In Saving the CEO, Danny spends a lot of time trying to convince Cassie to join him for Christmas at his mother’s hobby farm, where his hippie mom is undergoing a back-to-the-land-themed midlife crisis. Cassie, having visited with him the previous Christmas, decides she’s too fond of things like central heating and running water to accompany him. (And, of course, by the time Christmas rolls around, she’s too busy enjoying her happily-ever-after.) So Danny is on his own.

The Thaw
by Jenny Holiday

If Danny had known that his mother’s back-to-the-land kick had gotten so serious that she’d let the pipes freeze, he never would have agreed to come up to the farm for Christmas.

“Dammit!” he yelped as he tripped over something on his way to the outhouse. It was only nine o’clock, but on Christmas Eve in Cowbit, Ontario, it had already been dark for a good five hours. And since Mom had also decided that electricity was another bourgeois luxury she didn’t need, it was dark.

The flashlight on his iPhone barely punctured the unremitting black as he swung it around, trying to see what he’d tripped on. He stooped to pick up the large, oblong…butter churn? He wasn’t totally sure because even though Mom used the phrase “back to the land,” as if she were returning to some bucolic past, she had actually spent her whole life before moving to Cowbit in a succession of Toronto apartments. The only time Danny had seen a butter churn had been while watching reruns of Little House on the Prairie in one of those “shoeboxes in the sky,” as she now called them, so he wasn’t overly confident in his ability to ID one in the wild.

The thing about shoeboxes in the sky, though, is that they generally had heat, light, and running water. Not to mention TV, cell service, and nearby delis. In fact, he missed his own shoebox—his gorgeous, tricked out shoebox—something fierce right now.

Sighing, he aimed his phone in the general direction of the outhouse. “Merry fucking Christmas.”

“And happy fucking New Year.”

“Jesus Christ!” Danny jumped about a foot.

“Sorry.” The beam of a strong flashlight came closer, as did the sound of feet crunching in the snow. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“It’s okay,” he said, straining his eyes to make out the man behind the low, gravely voice. He was only able to see the guy’s legs, clad in jeans and Sorel boots.

“I’m Jake Arnet. I live over there.”

He could imagine Jake pointing over his shoulder, because other than his mom’s, there was only one other house on this stretch of rural road.

“Daniel Carlson,” he said. “I’m visiting my mom.”

“Ah,” said Jake, and Danny could hear the smile in his voice. “Son of the pioneer woman. Let me guess, you killed a deer for Christmas dinner, and you’re out here tanning its hide.”

“No. I consumed a veggie-soy loaf and a sugar-, dairy-, and gluten-free pumpkin pie for Christmas dinner, followed by a secret bag of potato chips I smuggled onto the premises, and now I am on my way to the outhouse because my mother apparently can’t be bothered to prevent her goddamned pipes from freezing.”

Jake laughed. A throaty, sexy laugh that warmed the frigid air. Danny wondered suddenly how old Jake was. Probably a sixty-something hermit like Danny’s mother. Why would you choose to live out here unless you’d been around the block a few times and/or were slightly mentally unhinged?

“You want to use my bathroom?”

The offer sent a jolt of pleasure through Danny’s frozen system. To take a piss without a coat on. To not have to worry about dropping his phone into the abyss. To wash his hands with hot water. The sound that ripped from his throat sounded vaguely, embarrassingly, orgasmic.

“I take it that’s a yes?”

“A thousand times yes.”

Another chuckle. “I hear you. I’m just out here for some firewood, and it’s cold enough. I don’t know how your mother does it.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Danny said as he let Jake’s beam of light guide him along a shoveled path. “Would you happen to know if my mother has a butter churn?”

“She does indeed.”

Danny shook his head at the impossibly starry night sky, and soon they’d reached Jake’s house, its windows dotted with warm, yellow light.

“Oh, you have electricity. God bless you.”

“And a furnace, and running water. I like to live large.”

Danny tried not to run the last few feet to the door.

“It’s open,” said Jake from behind him. “Just go in. I’m going to leave some of this wood on the porch.”

Danny gratefully did as instructed, pushing open the door and emerging into…the Davy Crockett edition of Architectural Digest.

The house was gorgeous. There was wood everywhere in the open-concept space—floors, a wall of cabinets, an enormous island that divided the kitchen from the living area. Low, warm light made everything glow. This was a log cabin fit for a king.

“Bathroom is just down the hall,” said Jake, coming in behind him and facing away from Danny as he shook the snow off his coat in the entryway.

The voice from the dark, it turned out, inhabited a tall, trim body. The jeans he’d caught a mere impression of outside hugged a spectacular ass. Danny closed his eyes for a moment. Look at him, ogling a straight, elderly mountain man. Had it come to this? This was the last year he spent Christmas in Cowbit.

Jake straightened, turned, and smiled.

Holy shit.

Not only was Jake not elderly, he couldn’t have been more than thirty-five.

Too bad Danny couldn’t also have been wrong about the straight part. Because Jake was gorgeous. But these butch mountain men always were. This one had black hair, green eyes, and full, pink naturally-pouty lips.

“After you use the bathroom, I’ll fortify you with real Christmas dinner—I’ve got leftovers.” When Danny didn’t say anything, just stood there gaping, Jake added, “If you want. Or, just use the bathroom.”

The prospect of contraband mashed potatoes jarred Danny into moving. As he passed a roaring fire in the living room, he almost wept as he stopped for a moment to hold his icy hands up to the flames. “I thought when you said you were getting firewood that maybe you heated this place with a wood stove.”

“Nope, forced air.” Jake grinned. “Just having a fire for the sake of it. If you can’t have a roaring fire on Christmas Eve, when can you?”

###

After standing with his hands under the hot tap for several minutes, Danny came back out to the main room to find a plate full of food on the coffee table in front of the fire.

“Oh my God,” he moaned. He knew he should probably wait until Jake reappeared, but the sight of gravy-drenched turkey and the mashed potatoes of his dreams threw all sense of decorum out the window, and he just sat right down and picked up a fork.

“You want a drink?” Jake asked from the kitchen. “I’m just back from dinner at a friend’s, and I could use one—it’s too dark and icy out here to mess with even one drink when you’re driving. Wine? Beer? I’ve got whiskey, too.”

“You choose,” said Danny, unable to form a more articulate sentence on account of the goat cheese and bacon-flecked mashed potatoes he had just placed on his tongue.

He swallowed as Jake approached with two glasses of red wine. “These potatoes are the best thing I have ever eaten in my entire life.”

“Aww. You’re just saying that because you’ve only had soy loaf today.”

“Did you make them? They’re unnaturally good.”

“I did. Took them to a potluck—all the local strays banded together for Christmas dinner—and I came back with some leftovers of everything.”

“Which I am demolishing,” Danny put his fork down. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” Jake motioned for him to continue. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I imagine staying with your mother is…challenging. Providing some protein and booze is the least I can do.”

“Do you know her well?”

“I’ve only been here ten months, so not really. We’re friendly enough. I tried to give her some advice about her corn last summer.

“Let me guess?” Danny said. “You told her to—I don’t know—water it, maybe?” Danny’s mom was under the impression that nature would provide everything. That all people needed to do was adjust their consumerist ways and then bask in the bounty of nature.

“Guilty as charged. I may have also suggested fertilizer.”

“Oooh. I bet she has a voodoo doll of you somewhere in her house.”

“She has been a little…distant lately.” Jake laughed. “It’s good of you to come visit, though.”

“I almost didn’t. My best friend usually comes with me, but she didn’t this year.” He thought of Cassie, who was no doubt cozied up with her billionaire boyfriend. They had only just admitted their feelings for one another, and it had been a happily-ever-after worthy of a romance novel. He’d be lucky if he ever found that kind love. He was happy for her, but in truth, he was a little jealous. And not just because she had heat and running water this Christmas.

He was getting maudlin. Time to change the subject. “So what about you? You farm?” Danny mother’s use of the word farm was impressionistic. Her place was a hobby farm at best. He hadn’t really noticed any crops in the immediate vicinity, but then, it was the dead of winter, and what did he know?

“Nope. I’m a carpenter.”

“That’s why this place is so gorgeous.” He eyed Jake, who, with the warm glow of the fire dancing on the sharp planes of his face, was just as gorgeous as his house. What a freaking shame. “How does a carpenter such as yourself end up in Cowbit?” He gestured at the wall of cabinets. “You could make a fortune selling those in Toronto.”

“I grew up in Peterborough,” Jake said, naming the small city that lay a couple hours to the south. “I’ve moved around a bit recently.” He smiled sheepishly. “Well, I went through a big break up recently, to be honest. One of those that makes you reassess your whole life, you know?

Danny didn’t know. He’d had a few doses of minor heartbreak, like anyone, but the idea of a love that changed everything was totally foreign to him. If he hadn’t watched Cassie and Jack tumble headlong into it, he would have said it was the stuff of fairy tales.

“I’d always wanted to start my own cabinet-making business, and after I picked myself up and dusted myself off, I thought, why the hell not? I don’t have any more to lose.”

“But why here?”

Jake shrugged. “If I’m being honest, I think part of the answer is that I was running away. My life was so intertwined with my ex. Same friends, all that. I needed something radically different. And this place was cheap, and it has a huge heated outbuilding I use as a workshop.”

Danny wanted to whistle his admiration. Jake seemed to be saying that he was a mess, but Danny saw quite the opposite: a man who’d taken control and changed his life, making it into something worthwhile and admirable.

It was strange to be sitting by the fire with a stranger, listening to him talk so openly. He was struck with the overwhelming desire to reciprocate, and, before he could think better of it, he blurted, “My best friend just got together with the guy of her dreams, and I’m afraid things will never be the same between us.

Where the hell had that come from?

“And also that I’ll be alone my whole life.”

And that?

But instead of getting up and running away screaming, Jake just nodded. “I know the feeling. But if you’ll excuse me going all Walden Pond on you for a moment, I think it’s important to accept that you might be alone forever. Any of us might be.”

“Well, aren’t you a bundle of Christmas joy?” Danny had been trying to lighten the mood, but the joke had almost caught in his thickening throat.

“I’m serious. That’s my big takeaway from the break up. You have to be okay with being alone. I know I sound like a self-help book, but it’s true. It’s impossible to have a meaningful relationship, romantic or platonic, if part of the reason you’re in it—even a tiny part of the reason—is that you’re afraid to be alone.”

Jake shook his head. “Dude. Sorry. I got carried away there.” He poured some more wine into Danny’s glass. “You came over to use the bathroom, and now I’m laying all this philosophy shit on you.”

Danny smiled. “It’s okay.” He refrained from saying that Jake’s comments had hit a little too close to home. He took a big gulp of wine, then cleared his throat. “Well, whoever your ex is, she sounds like a great big idiot to me. If she can walk away from a guy who makes mashed potatoes like this, she’s not right in the head.”

Jake, who had been staring at the fire, swung his gaze to Danny. Stared at him for a long moment.

NOTE: This is an extended version of a post I have up at Entangled in Romance–they’re running a series this month of many of their authors’ holiday recipes.

My grandma’s pumpkin chiffon pie makes an appearance at pretty much every Holiday family holiday (ha! get it?). Unlike straight up pumpkin pie with its dense, in-your-face presence, this is a light, airy, custardy delight straight out of the 1960s. Like all the best family recipes, this one comes with some mystery, namely WHY DOES IT NOT THICKEN WHEN THE RECIPE SAYS IT WILL? Alas, my grandmother isn’t around to ask anymore, and everyone just sort of gives it their best shot and the pie always turns out just fine. Scroll down to the bottom of this post if you want to skip the BS and get right to the pie.

Basically you dump everything into a double boiler and wait for it to get hot. The recipe says it will thicken. IT WILL NOT THICKEN.

Or, if you are not the kind of person who possesses a double, boiler, you rig up something classy like this. And if you’re like me, you give up halfway through and just put the small pot directly on the stove. Nothing bad will happen. Just stir a lot and don’t let the eggs scramble.

The next step (NOT PICTURED. I’LL SIGN IT UP FOR RETAKE DAY, OKAY?) is to beat egg whites with sugar and fold them into the pumpkin mixture. Yes, there are raw egg whites in this recipe. What can I say? It’s from a simpler time, before salmonella, helicopter parenting, and Kim Kardashian. Also, if Rocky Balboa can eat raw eggs, so can you.

And that’s pretty much it. Pour everything into a pie shell, and you’re good to go.

Probably you should bake your own pie shell. Or you could buy a frozen one and read a romance novel with all the time you save.

If you have extra filling, which I always do, you can pour it into ramekins and eat it like custard. This is a good option if you have gluten free peeps in your family like I do.

Here’s the naked pie. Also some naked custards. I remember eating it like this when I was a kid, but the second generation of bakers added a layer of whipped cream, which I endorse in the strongest possible terms.

Then, if you want to be fancy and/or, like me, your fondness for high-fat dairy products knows no bounds, you can add a layer of whipped cream, which you can doctor however you like (I like just a bit of sugar and a pinch of cinnamon).

Separate eggs. Beat yolks slightly. Add 2 cup sugar, pumpkin, salt, milk, and spices. Cook until thick in a double boiler, about 20 minutes. (IT WILL NOT GET THICK, DUDES. I just let it cook and be hot/simmer but watch closely so as not to scramble the eggs. Soften gelatin in water. Add to the pumpkin mixture. Mix thoroughly and cool. Beat egg whites, and toward the end of the beating, add ½ cup sugar. Beat until stiff. When pumpkin mixture begins to thicken (BECAUSE OF THE JELLO!), fold in the egg whites. Pour into a previously-baked pie shell. I think my grandma left things here, but the recipe has evolved in subsequent generations to add one final step: When cool, top with a layer of whipped cream to which a pinch of cinnamon and sugar to taste has been added. Chill.

My friend Lily and I went on a twentieth anniversary trip earlier this fall. TWENTY years of being friends. Of course, I have a few childhood friends I’ve known longer, but really no one that I’ve been in regular, frequent contact with for two decades.

Lily and I met at our student jobs in college. We worked in an office where we filed (remember that?), answered phones and did general admin. Our boss started putting us on the same shift because he thought we had had nothing in common and hence would be super productive. Ha ha ha. Ha. Ha. (I’m still laughing.)

To be fair, it wasn’t an unreasonable assumption. On the surface, Lily, in all her goth glory, was an unlikely bestie for my Gap-wearing, average suburban self. But as Lily likes to say, I’m goth inside. Apparently.

Whatever. The point is that we hied ourselves off to some woods that were located roughly at the midpoint between our two cities. We were renting a little cottage.

So imagine our surprise when we turned into the property and saw this.

Possibly there is a toddler riding a Big Wheel down the halls of this gem.

Here, look at it from another angle.

Another angle: less spooky? Um, lemmethinkNO.

Or this one.

I am smiling on the outside, but I am screaming on the inside.

So already this has become Lily’s dream vacay. We peeked in the windows. Lots of old furniture, boxes upon boxes upon boxes (we’re talking Hoarders, here), and a pinball machine (really) were easily visible.

Who owned this place? Who lived here back in the day? No idea. Because this area we were in was, no offense and name withheld to protect the innocent, no great shakes. Some lakefront cottages, some modest houses in the village.

A live bait vending machine on the street corner. You know, the usual.

Live bait. No humans to be seen, but someone has to be stocking this thing, no?

Whatever its story, this place was glorious, both inherently and in its decay. It was also a little bit creepy. And hard not to think about as we went to bed in our tiny little cottage.

But luckily, there was a sign in the bathroom reminding us to stay positive. I don’t know about you, but I appreciate being reminded to be grateful when I’m in the bathroom.

The next morning, I got up early and went for a run. The house down the road, our nearest neighbour, had a big billboard up in their yard that said PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD. I’m not gonna lie, it was a little unnerving. Especially the part where, when I got to the village proper, I got chased by some dogs. For real. Right now the only reason I’m not writing this from the ninth circle of hell is that the owners of those nice doggies understood that if you’re not gonna train your attack dogs, you need an electric fence.

When I got home, I informed Lily that she was not allowed to leave the cottage alone because I was afraid the local populace might mistake her for a Satanist, what with the black clothes and the black hair. I was kidding. Kind of.

“Maybe,” I said, as we sat in the lukewarm, mildewey smelling hot tub that came with the cottage, “what’s actually happening is that we came to this creepy village, the rapture happened, and all that’s left is us, those mean dogs, and this scary-ass mansion.” Because we had not seen a human since we arrived. Bear in mind that I was reading Sarah Balance’s brilliant Sins of Salem series while I was on this trip (because who DOESN’T want to read witch-trial-themed historical romance whist sitting in a lukewarm hot tub?), so that was adding to the general air of spookiness.

That night, we drove to the nearest town for dinner and were reassured that even if we weren’t among the Elect, at least we were not alone. Also, there was still pizza.

However, the theme of the weekend continued to assert itself, as roughly every fourth establishment we passed was abandoned. Including the Holiday Saloon, which was a shame because when I saw this sign, I thought, I HAVE FOUND MY PEOPLE. But my sorrow was short-lived as I became distracted by talking Lily out of breaking in through a cracked second floor window because although she does not fear the long arm of the law, I most certainly do.

How you know you have keeper in the BFF department: She lays on her back on the sidewalk to take your pic because “the angle is better.”

When I got home, I googled the town and found a few ghost stories attached to the mysterious house. It was all very spooky-weird.

The weirdest thing about this place was that there were two rocking chairs with little red cushions sitting on the porch.

Paging your worst nightmare.

I wish I had a clever, tidy way to end this rambly post, but I do not. Here, here’s a picture of me having my morning coffee by the creepy mansion. Happy Halloween!

I’m blogging over at Entangled in Romance today about how the official song of my debut romance novel, Saving the CEO, is the theme song to the children’s TV show Blue’s Clues. As I said in that post, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, consider yourself lucky.

I was kidding of course. (Kind of. When I’m old and gray, that song will probably still give me PTSD. And then I’ll arrive at the pearly gates and a pack of blue squeaky dogs will make me solve mysteries before I get in.)

Want to know what the theme song for the book is? Why, it’s Love’s the Only Rule, by my boyfriend, Jon Bon Jovi.

What? You didn’t know JBJ was my boyfriend? That’s okay, he doesn’t either. Jon and I have been dating since the early 1980s, when his hair was bigger than mine, but whatever.

I tried to find a better pic of 1980s era JBJ, but we’re all about respecting copyright here at jennyholiday.com, and this was the only creative commons one I could find. But REMEMBER? (Photo by Rhonda Oglesby via Flickr.)

Love’s the Only Rule is the perfect song for my characters Jack and Cassie, because, man do these two ever have rules. Jack especially is the poster boy for the tightly wound, Type A persona. But as the back cover copy of the book says, you don’t build a business empire without a little discipline.

Enter Cassie, the math genius who is is perfectly positioned to rescue a business deal gone sour for Jack. And, of course, she’s going to force his hand on a few other issues, too. All I will say is: rules will be broken, people. In an enjoyable way.

Joking aside, I actually listened to this song obsessively while working on edits for this book. I love the way it builds, just like a story, until it feels like the chorus is inevitable. Just like a good love story.

On the one hand, how excited was I that my sister and I just walked into a fancy nail bar on a random sisters’ weekend in an unfamiliar city, and they had CND Vinylux* in Dark Dahlia just sitting there as one of their options?

On the other hand, how depressing is it that you can walk into a high end nail bar and spend a lot of money on black nail polish that everyone and their red carpet walking sister is sporting?

The expensive gothy manicure in question. My sister’s gray nails are behind. The manicurist said they “looked like concrete, but in a good way.” I think they might actually be more genuinely gothy than mine.

Back to the first hand: how awesome is it to have a professional apply your black nail polish? Instead of looking like a six-year-old in detox was your manicurist, the edges are all meticulous. Plus they rub your arms with lemony lotion. And because you’re there with your beloved but seldom-seen sister, you are content to sit there gabbing indefinitely while the polish dries, instead of telling yourself the ill-fated lie that enough time has passed so that you can go to sleep/eat M&Ms/drywall the bathroom.

And one more time back to the other hand: you used to be able to buy a tube of black Wet n Wild for one dollar.

So basically what you’re experiencing anew here is that moment you realize you’ve been telling yourself you are the unique orchid soul sister of Angela Chase from My So-Called Life, only to discover that EVERYONE ELSE thinks they are the unique orchid soul sister of Angela Chase from My So-Called Life.

These are first world problems, to be sure, but…dang.

By all outward appearances, I am not a goth. But my friend Lily tends that way. It’s kind of amazing that we’re friends at all because on the surface we have nothing in common. Once I saw a pin that said, “Goth Inside,” and I told her I was going to get that etched on her tombstone. She countered that it was actually the perfect descriptor for me. Apparently underneath my pink clothing and sunny disposition, I have a goth soul. I took it as a huge compliment.

But I digress. The point is that in 2014 you can totally pay someone a crapload of money to paint your nails black. As you’ve gathered, I’m deeply conflicted about this.

And then Lorde! She shows up at the Grammys not just with black nails, but with black-dipped top finger joints! How can a 40-year-old “Goth Inside” girl compete?

I cannot. I can just throw my pink scarf on and pay for my Dark Dahlia nails, and mind meld with Angela.

*CND. It is the shit. Seriously, that stuff lasts, and I’m not even talking about the shellac because that crap scares me. They are not paying me to say this, but they should be.

My sister and I are prone to long text exchanges about the Mindy Project because we are both crushing HARD on that show. Here’s one from toward the end of the last season. (This an exchange between two 40-ish professional women. It might also be a sign of the end times.)

Sister: Have you watched Mindy?

Me: Actually I am behind. I am so ridic busy right now. I hate it. I just watched the one with the old cop guy. Have you seen this one? I want to discuss, but I don’t want to spoil it if you haven’t seen it.

Sis: Yes I am all caught up. Watch then let’s discuss.

Me: OK. But I want to say that I totally like the direction of this hot older cop dude. Of course we all want Mindy + Danny but they can’t do that too soon or the show will be over. But I like the idea of her going out with someone who is not her usual type (b/c her usual type never works).

Sis: I somewhat agree. But I am too biased on Castellano. But it does make me wish I would have ended up with someone with a fun Staten Island accent because I kind of love it.

The next day…

Me: OK, I saw the most recent. I still like Charlie the Cop guy for maybe the rest of season season. Obvs it’s ultimately Danny + Mindy 4 Ever, but…a totally fun diversion. And we don’t want them to become David and Maddie and get all settled and boring too soon.

Sis: NO!!!! DANNY + MINDY!!!!!!!

Me: The real question I have, and what keeps me watching the show, is: Is Mindy K using Mindy L to make a point about the shallow, narcissistic nihilism of contemporary culture or is she just really, really funny and charming and I’m overthinking (me?). Anyway, I think it’s the tension between these two possibly simultaneously-true interpretations that makes me love the show.

Sis: Overthinking.

Me: Also, Mindy K has as her Twitter background photo a still from the Emma Thompson Sense and Sensibility. Clearly, we are soul sisters.

Sis: Maybe she’ll read your book when it comes out.

Me: Ha. In my dreams. Excuse me while I go die.

Me: Though when I tell people I have a Regency romance novel coming out and they go “huh?” I always say, “It’s like Jane Austen world, but they have sex.” NOT THAT I’M COMPARING MYSELF TO JANE AUSTEN.

Me: But the show is TOTALLY a modern day Austen. Commentary on/parody of on social mores. Romance. Cute clothes.

I went on a retreat, and this was my bath. Really there’s nothing else to say, so I should probably stop here.

Writing friends are weird. (And by “weird” I mean “THE BEST.”)

You go about your normal life. You have friends. You also have “friends.” Your real-life friends are neighbours or co-workers or older friends you’ve made a point to keep in touch with. Your “friends” are people you care about—or don’t care about but don’t have the balls to unfriend, even when they post status updates about their latest firearms purchases—but don’t really interact with in any meaningful way. If you’re lucky, you have a real life friend who really knows you. I’m talking about knowing all your secrets. Hopes and dreams and all that shit. And frustrations: they know what makes you rage-y, which is just as important as hopes and dreams and all that shit. I’ve been lucky in this department.

But then you have your writing friends. They’re in their own category. You meet them because you’re both writing. You might have nothing else in common, but the thing that you both get is that even though you have nothing in common, you have everything in common. Because your writing friends? You might as well slice open your stomach and literally spill your guts. They get to see what you write before it’s ready for anyone else’s eyes. They see it while it’s still half-baked, ill-formed. You trust them enough to say, “Here’s this thing I made. Now tell me what’s wrong with it.” The best of them see what you meant, rather than what you wrote, and I’m telling you, you can’t pay for that shit. (Also there’s the part where they will happily talk about comma splices for twenty minutes at a time.)

And even more than all this, your writing friends are the first people with whom you practice being who you want to be. Because you’ve already put your vulnerable, quivering innards on display, it goes without saying that these people understand that what you’re saying is: “I want to be a writer.”

I might be a party of one here, but saying that was a big deal for me. It meant saying, “I think I can write something good enough—eventually.” It went against my ingrained Midwestern self-deprecation. It meant saying, “Here is what I’m trying to do. It might not be good enough, but I’m showing it to you anyway.”

Oh, I’m speaking in abstracts here, and what’s more boring than that? Let’s get real. I have two writing BFFs and I want to talk about them a little bit. I’m gonna go chronologically.

One, named May (who isn’t published yet, but it’s only a matter of time), I met because we were match-made by a friend in common who somehow knew we were both romance novel readers with vague ideas of maybe-someday-writing-one. I have been trying to figure out when we first stared corresponding, but since I have the worst memory in the world, all I can say is 2007? 2008? I don’t know? But weekly email updates have been exchanged for MANY years. Bribes have been enforced. (I may or may not have pledged to give $200 to the George W. Bush presidential library fund if I didn’t finish manuscript X by date Y.)

The other, Sandra Owens, I met in a funny way. I can’t talk about it (or I’d have to kill you), but suffice it to say that we met because we were both complaining about a situation we found ourselves in. I don’t think Sandy would disagree with me when I say that on paper, we don’t have a lot in common. Stage of life, geography, even subgenre: not the same! But it doesn’t matter because she’s seen my innards. I will say that when we met in person at RWA in Atlanta last year it was a huge relief that we clicked in “real life.”

So last weekend the three of us, who have doing weekly email check-ins/cheerleading sessions for years, rented a house on Lake Erie.

It was my second meeting with Sandy, my first ever (!) with May.

Oh, my God. The house was huge and gorgeous. The beach was gorgeous. The sunsets were gorgeous.

The view. You know, no big,

The company was the gorgeous-est of all Everyone was working on different stuff. Everyone was also juggling various real life demands, but as pledged, everyone put those aside (except for that one time May decided to do her Latin homework “for fun” over lunch).

We got up every morning, and by unspoken agreement, we wrote. Sometimes we peeled off individually for walks on the beach, naps, and so on, but we all had our noses to the grindstone pretty much all day.

Then came wine o’clock, which meant readings. And by “readings,” I mean reading out loud from works in progress. Dang, I’d rather be on a roller coaster. But Prosecco helps.

Look at Sandy reading from a book y’all don’t het to read for MONTHS.

Then we talked about what we read. Then we drank more wine. And ate cupcakes. Then we went to bed.

Then we did it all again the next day.

My outdoor office. Which is kind of a lie. It was really more like a still life that I arranged and photographed, and then it was too cold so I went back inside. But still.

So I’m having a little trouble with reentry. Because I want to live in that place, that lovely zone where you meet the people who see your guts all year long, and they say, “I understand. You’re doing a good job. Here’s a cupcake and a glass of wine. Don’t worry, your innards are safe with me.”

[Insert that one time when I thought I would go on maternity leave and finish my book and get an agent and get a book deal…oh, and care for an infant here.] [In my defense, I do live in Canada, Land of the One Year Mat Leave.]

[Now you should go fix a snack in order to simulate time passing. Eat it and watch a TV show, then get back to me.]

Well then, my friends, I got me an agent. I got me a kick-ass agent. That had always been goal number one. Like, to the extent that I actually avoided having my work seen by editors, which made for a few pathetically-comic situations in which editors wanted to see said work. (More on this in another post. Maybe.) There is more to say here, for sure. I can make entire speeches on the following topics: Why do you need an agent in the current publishing climate? Why do you need an agent when many publishers accept unagented manuscripts? Couldn’t you make 80 bazillion more dollars self-publishing? But I shan’t make them now (the arguments, not the dollars). (More on this in another post. Maybe.)

The relevant point is that said agent called me the day after my 40th birthday to tell me there was interest in my books.

Picture this, if you will: you just turned 40. It was fun. You got a massage and then you went to dinner sans child. However, now you are 40 + one day. And your very-early-January birthday always lines up with the first week back to work after the holidays. And you always extend your holiday overconsumption to your birthday because, come on, when your birthday is this close to New Year’s you might as well round up. So when it is one day past your birthday, the fun is over on SO MANY FRONTS. Holidays over. Time for kale. Back to work. You are 40 and there is NOTHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO EVER AGAIN.

I was, in fact, having a monologue on this very topic to my friend Lulu whilst washing dishes when my agent called. (ON THE OTHER PHONE. Sometimes I want to go back to my 1985 self and be like, you are NOT GOING TO BELIEVE THIS SHIT.) Then a complicated chain of emails and voicemails and calling back commenced, because my 1985 self is basically still in charge of my life.

So there was some to-ing and fro-ing (not in my heart, just about the contract details) and, lo, a couple months later I have signed a three-book deal with Entangled Publishing. Regencies! Like, it’s 1813 and shit! Maybe you will want to read them! (Probably you should just go back and re-watch Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice but you can only do that for six hours every day, so what the hell else are you going to do with all those other hours?)

So, in summation: Being 40 kind of sucked. Being 40 + one day kind of rocked.

Lily sent me a talking card for my birthday featuring David Hasselhoff. (As one does.) When you open it, he says, “Hey! I’m David Hasselhoff, and I’d like to wish you a very happy birthday. Also, I am not wearing a shirt.” (And he isn’t.)

David delights BG, who likes to open the card approximately 800 million times a day and has recently developed a game where he opens and closes it as fast as he can, so that David can only get the first word of his greeting out. The result is David Hasselhoff saying, “Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!” on an endless loop. Also, there was the part where BG announced to his grandmother: “Lily sent Mama a card with David Hasselhoff on it, and he’s NAKED!”

Ah, Lily. She’s my ray of Gothic sunshine, and I got to see her over the holidays since we made overlapping trips back to Minneapolis. BG, Mr. Mock, and I had dragged our sick selves there, brewing all kinds of microbes and exhausted from three days without power thanks to a wicked Toronto ice storm. Mostly we cocooned with Grammy & Gramps, but one freezing night Mr. Mock and I ventured out to meet Lily. It was bone cold as only Minnesota can be. Minnesota cold is clear and dry and sharp, a knife that slices away all the bullshit. You can’t be wishy-washy in cold like that: you have to know where you’re going, you have to walk fast, and you might as well laugh and chat along the way because the alternative is paying an inordinate amount of time to your own suffering, and that’s never attractive. I think this is what people mean when they say cold is invigorating: move fast and try not to die.

We settled at a restaurant that managed to be fancy and cozy at the same time—huge crystal chandeliers and mismatched sofas around low tables. (I’m a sucker for the whole Shabby Chic thing. It gives me hope that someday my house will look nice. Hey, I have one of the two categories already covered.) Lily and I snuggled on a sofa in the window while the gentlemen sat on the other side of the table talking about Doctor Who.

To get the restaurant we’d walked from another bar along the Loring Greenway, which is a walkway-urban-planning-thingy that is hard to explain, so you should just google it. We power-walked through the cold, and I looked at all the lights on in the buildings adjacent to it and sighed.

“I’m imagining an alternate life,” I said to Lily after several ridiculously delicious dishes had been consumed. “We never left Minneapolis, and I live in a condo on the Loring Greenway, and I’m a writer.” (Okay, I AM a writer, but in my fantasy I’m a different KIND of writer.) “I come here every afternoon at four o’clock with my laptop and order a Prosecco and edit what I’ve written for the day. And you live somewhere around here, too, so you can meet me at five.”

This fantasy is mostly about missing Lily, about how life is brighter with her around, and about how her proximity gives me a little ping of satisfaction in my chest that doesn’t happen when she’s not here. But, always good with details, Lily picks up the narrative immediately and tells me about her rundown loft on the river. If I hadn’t already had three drinks at this point, I would be better equipped to give you more details about this fictional loft. There might be a darkroom in it, I’m not sure.

The best thing about Lily is that we both know instinctively that even though the point of this fantasy is that we get to be together, we don’t actually live together. Because we’re totally mismatched that way. No, we just overlap a little bit, every day. Writing that sentence makes me cry a little because surely that’s what heaven will be: overlapping a little with Lily every day.

So we spin out our little fantasy for a few minutes: Meet you at five o’clock at Lurcat EVERY DAY! To which we have both journeyed from our respective PERFECT apartments.

It’s so cold that it’s even cold inside. Ice crystals have formed on the window we’re sitting in. They’re blooming in elaborate patterns that make me think of snowflakes.

Alternate lives are like snowflakes: different facets of the same whole. The older you get, the more you realize that the life you have is a product of a bunch of decisions. When you’re young, you think these decisions are super important. They paralyze you with their weightiness. But really, you just muddle through the best you can. If you’re lucky, like I am, you end up with awesome people like Mr. Mock and BG.

But part of the rub of having a lucky, charmed life, is that you start to realize that aging is about coming to understand that every turn in the path means there’s a bunch of paths that you’re never going to go down—that you actually don’t have time to do it all, as you so brazenly believed when you were young and invincible. And even though that’s okay, it’s sometimes hard to let go of all the other possibilities. Aging is about mourning the other lives you didn’t get to have.

But when it’s 20 below and you’re with Lily for one night in an impossibly beautiful restaurant, it’s like the divide between you and your alternate lives narrows. Or like that snowflake: it turns, and suddenly there’s another facet facing up, even though you know it’s going to melt before you can get a good look at it.

It seems like lately the internet is all about us versus them. The singletons versus the marrieds. The stay-at-home moms versus the working moms. Click like, thumbs up, thumbs down.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: aren’t we a lot more complicated in our souls? Aren’t we all of these things at once, like a snowflake turning over? Aren’t we always missing whatever version of us we buried so that we could become who we are?

And wouldn’t it be awesome to meet Lily every night at five o’clock at Lurcat? It would, but in this incarnation, I’m going to have to settle for a talking David Haselhoff birthday card. Happy 40th to me.

P.S. If you are going to Lurcat, eat in the bar. This all took place in the bar. I cannot vouch for the cafe. I think it might be too fancy-fancy.

P.P.S. We ate in the bar, but they let us order off the cafe menu. This is getting confusing.

Yea or nay? I’m a nay. And I won the dance-off, so I get to rule. Photo by Yuichi Sakuraba via Flickr Creative Commons.

There was another slumber party. (Who knew the extremely late thirties were going to be a second golden era for slumber parties?) We skipped the nature walk this time, though we did pretend until the very last minute that we were going to go on one, going so far as to pack winter hiking gear. Then we arrived at the boss’s house, and she uncorked the pink champagne. So what I’m saying is there was pink champagne on one hand, and a nature walk in subzero temperatures on the other.

You can probably surmise which one prevailed when I tell you that an hour later we were cruising to the pizza place and Lulu was shrieking, “I can sober up really fucking fast if we’re pulled over! I’m not taking the fall for you bitches!” (This is where we pause to disclaim that Lulu was not, in fact, driving. She was just being theatrical. The Boss, who was, in fact, driving, had not had anything to drink. Like, at all. Because we knew we had to go pick up the pizza. And because, evidence to the contrary, we’re not idiots. And because she’s the hostess with the mostess, and she knows that the hostess always designatedly drives. Mind you, we did pick up our pizza at 3 pm to take home and eat later, so there’s that.)

The main point of this sleepover was a re-match of last year’s Wii dance off. Me versus the Boss. The odds were on me, due to my landslide victory a year ago, which was, in turn, due to my uncanny ability to replicate the “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” moves (who knew?).

I talked some serious trash in the lead up, but in truth I was a little nervous this time. We were playing over the honour of a man. Kind of like a medieval tournament, but in reverse. And instead of, like, handkerchiefs as tokens of the beloved, there was Google images.

And that man was…Adam Levine. How this happened, I do not know. Somehow, I got pulled into a dance-off over the honour of that Maroon Five tattooed muscle dude.

I’m sorry, but I just don’t get Adam Levine. I could make a list of why, but that seems rude. Suffice it to say the Boss is a fan, and I am not.

After I kicked the boss’s ass, even without having to rely on any Dirty Dancing ditties, Lulu, ever the peacemaker, got philosophical.

I get it. He’s a total pig. If he came up to me, I’d like: gross. But sometimes there’s just the lust, and it is what it is.

Pause while she gazes at the ceiling.

If I knew what it was about him, I’d make a lot of money.

Then the boss and I put a squirrel Christmas ornament in Lulu’s bed, and instead of passing out from fear—she really hates squirrels—she just said, “VERY FUNNY.”

And then it was 10 pm and we all went to bed because we’re big talkers but that’s about it.

Got Mary Lou added to the wall of fame at the local meat market today. That sounds like some horrible metaphor. But I mean it literally. It’s an accomplishment, people. Image: General Mills via Flickr Creative Commons.

So everyone is doing daily gratitude thingies this month, it seems. I had a day off work, so I decided to pay attention. So here is a day’s worth. (Don’t worry, tomorrow we resume our regularly-scheduled program of selfish non-gratitude.

1. No commuting today.

2. Hence no hurry to get the kid bundled up and out the door. So we had a 7 am Taylor Swift dance party. The kid, Bear, Mr. Greenius, and I are never, ever, ever getting back together with you. Just so you know.

3. The province of Ontario’s commitment to early childhood education, which means my three-year-old can go to full-day junior kindergarten with integrated, affordable day care tacked on at the end of the day.

4. Kindergarten teacher extraordinaire Mr. Brink, who coaxes wonderful insights out of my kid, teaches him crazy-awesome songs, and makes him want to go to school.

5. Due to accident of birth, I don’t live in the Philippines, and can sit a world away worrying about commuting and kindergarten.

7. Funny fake grass as the “winter” plantings in the big planters on the Danforth.

8. The guys at the local meat market. They have a big chalkboard that lists “athletes that get free meat here” and another one that lists “athletes who aren’t welcome here.” I don’t recognize most of the names, but when I make a case for Mary Lou Retton on the former, they pull a chair over, stand on it, and add her name—but not after some debate about the ethics of pulling tween girls out of school and making them do gymnastics for six hours a day. They also have tapped the keg in back—it’s Friday after all—and are pressing pints on customers. I decline, but I appreciate the gesture.

9. The fact that I can walk to the meat market to buy fancy bacon and also to the newsstand to pick up an arcane publication that I suddenly need (a story for another post).

10. Wise yoga teacher who sends tailor-made advice.

11. Yoga!

12. When I walk in the door, Mr. Mock, awesome feminist husband who walks the walk, is doing bath (and has already done pick up and dinner).

13. Both boys are belting out O Canada at the top of their lungs—in harmony.

14. For a very brief window of time, I, despite my certified tin ear, am the preferred singer in the household due entirely to my ability to remember lyrics. Mr. Mock can harmonize but he can’t remember the words to Do-Re-Me. I, on the other hand, can belt out all three (long) verses of Rainbow Connection on demand.

15. The kid has taught me to enjoy singing again, which I haven’t done since I got old enough to know about my tin ear.

16. I basically live in an episode of Portlandia.

17. Which I appreciate is a direct result of the taxes I happily pay. Because there is no Tea Party here.

As far as I know, David Bowie has never adopted this look. But I am prepared to be wrong.

BG’s Bowie fixation endures. This morning, Grammy took him to school. Our usual crossing guard is Joe, a lovely man who plays his stop sign like a guitar when he’s not actively engaged crossing kids. Grammy pointed out to BG that it wasn’t Joe today, but a substitute. BG did not accept this interpretation, insisting that it was, in fact, Joe. After they’d crossed, BG told Grammy that Joe had just “changed his look. Like David Bowie.”

Actual feet. My actual feet. Lulu’s actual feet. That one time when we ran through the woods. Except we’re not in the wood yet, obvs.

So apparently I’m running the Scotiabank Waterfront 5k in a little over a week. So apparently I’ve been slacking in the whole fundraising thing. But I haven’t been slacking in the training. Which is sort of amazing, because I’m very good at quitting. (Though I like to think of it less like quitting, and more like being gifted at trying lots of different things.)

To recap: The Boss announced her intention to run a half marathon that was to take place four months after her chemotherapy ended. She’d been training for one when a breast cancer diagnosis crash landed in the middle of her life last fall. (You can read more backstory here and here. Or you can read about the Boss in her own words here.)

So Lulu and I thought we could probably get off our healthy bums and train for the 5K that’s associated with the race. You know, like a tribute to the lady who brought us together (she really was our boss) and became our beloved friend. So we embarked upon the Couch to 5K training program, which involves a lot of walking and running. And walking and running and walking and running. Then there’s more running than walking. Eventually there’s no walking at all.

I’m not gonna lie, running is not my favourite way to pass the time. I’m not a natural runner, I guess. It’s fine. It’s nice when it’s over. Toward the end of a run, I sometimes chant in time with my steps: “This is not as hard as chemotherapy.” One syllable per step. Yes, I sound like an idiot.

Once this summer Lulu and I were in the same town, and we ran through some woods together. And here I would have thought if Lulu and I were ever running through the woods together it would have been because someone was chasing us or we’d decided to re-enact the Blair Witch Project or something.

Mind you, if I HAD to, I could probably have run a 5K when I started. But it wouldn’t have been pretty. My goal was to run it comfortably, to feel like I’d truly invested the time to get ready for it. And, you guys, I totally have.

I’ll be raising money for the North York General Hospital Foundation. North York is where the Boss had her chemotherapy, and they were very good to her.

So, if you wanted to throw a few bucks my way, I’d be very, very grateful. You can do that here:

The Baby Goth and I went to the Art Gallery of Ontario today. There’s a giant 20-foot version of the picture above plastered on the outside. (Because they have the Bowie exhibition, which you should go to if you’re in Toronto. It’s fun, if not transcendent. What I learned when I went: Bowie has a 26-inch waist. The costumes! They are so small!)

BG did a cartoon stop in front of Bowie, like someone put the brakes on him. After a moment of silent, slack-jawed staring, he turned to me and said, “What IS that?” We had a little convo about Bowie (yes, I know, it’s too Portlandia, isn’t it?). The takeaway for BG was: Bowie has two different coloured eyes. Bowie sings some good songs. Bowie has red and blue lightning on his face, and BG is a little concerned about whether it’s going to come off. We can’t see his nails, but maybe Bowie has silver toenails like Lily and BG do.

Then we went in, and our first stop was their family activity centre, where you can play and make art and read books. BG demands some paper and markers and then he writes his name. Then he writes, “Papa.”

So apparently this junior kindergarten thing is working.

I did not know he could write. I played it cool. I don’t know what I’m doing in this whole parenting thing, but I did once read an article that stuck with me that said, “praise the effort, not the outcome.” Because, you know, otherwise, you end up with entitled kids for whom life in the real world as a non-famous person is a crushing disappointment. So I told him he was doing a really good job holding the marker and concentrating so he could write.

But inside, yes, I was freaking out a little. I was going to take a picture and post it on Facebook, but then I calmed down and realized that everyone learns to write, and it’s not inherently an interesting phenomenon unless it’s happening to your kid.

Then BG asked if we could make a sign that said, “Welcome Lily.” Because a week ago, we made a sign lettered thusly in honour of Her Awesomeness’s arrival—she came bearing silver nail polish—but I did the lettering on that one. One week later, BG asked me to tell him each letter, and he wrote it.

Um, hello? Paging the Nobel committee. (Praise the effort, not the outcome!)

BG tired of his genius, so off we went, to see some miniature ships and some paintings of icebergs.

Then we went home and BG wrote signs welcoming various people to our house.

Later that night, after the standard epic bedtime struggle, I thought about the whole thing. It was difficult not to conclude that Bowie did in fact put the whammy on my kid, that as they stood there and stared at each other, Bowie somehow MADE HIM LITERATE.

But of course for that we must thank junior kindergarten teacher Mr. Brink, who works in the trenches every day with nary a museum exhibition mounted in his honour. Incidentally, BG pointed out later, during an impromptu Bowie video marathon, that Mr. Brink looks like Tin Machine era Bowie. They both play guitars (true) and they both have the same hair (sort of true).

I told BG that when he was baby, Mr. Mock and I liked to watch him sleep. In those colic-ridden months when BG would cry for six consecutive hours every night, we would sometimes find ourselves with a rare moment where he was asleep and we were not. We would drag our exhausted selves, feeling like husks of people rather than actual people, to his side and stare. Somehow, we got into this habit of singing Starman to him.

There’s a starman waiting in the sky.
He’d like to come and meet us, but he thinks he’d blow our minds.
There’s a starman waiting in the sky.
He’s told us not to blow it cause he knows it’s all worthwhile

BG now demands Starman at odd intervals, including bed time. I had to do a rendition when I kissed him goodbye this morning.

Mind blown. Trying not to blow it. That about sums up this whole parenting thing, doesn’t it?

I have seen a lot of plays in my time, so I have seen a lot of man parts. In fact, I have seen more man parts on stage than I have seen in real life. Have you ever noticed how movies show boobs but plays show dicks? I have seen King Lear’s stuff as he wanders the heath, incoherent. I have seen Dude in Jail’s stuff (Mamet? Shepard?) as he talks to his cell mate. I have seen Young Spock’s stuff in Angels in America, the greatest play ever written. This is just a small sample. The celebrity sample, if you will. Allow me to translate: I have seen stuff belonging to Ian McKellan, Kenneth Branagh, and Zachary Quinto. Every single time, though I tried to play it cool, I was compelled by forces greater than me to turn to my companion and go: Oh My. God. And, my friends, that’s just the celebrity stuff. I have seen the stuff belonging to working actors in many cities, in plays both classical and modern. And yet and I have seen very few boobs on stage. The only example that comes to mind, actually, is Hair, and there was equal opportunity boobage/stuffage there. The sun shone in an equal opportunity sort of way, if you know what I mean.

I’m trying to figure out if this means theatre is a more feminist medium than movies, or vice versa. Like, enlightened theatre directors don’t want to be sexist, so they don’t deign to write boobage, but they don’t mind stuffage? But probably not. It’s probably more a case of cowboys playing doctor in a David Gilmour Serious Heterosexual Guy sort of way. But then I think of HBO. But half of that is Lena Dunham’s fault anyway. So who knows?

I have the worst memory. I really do. I can read a book and two days later I can’t remember anything about it. I never know if something in the past happened two years ago or ten years ago. I was recently asked for a concrete example of my bad memory and all I could come up with was: I went to a play in London once (two years ago? ten?) and Kenneth Branagh was in it. He was in jail and we saw all his man parts and he talked to his cell mate a lot. It might have been by David Mamet. It might have been by Sam Shepard. I’m just guessing on the playwrights because the men-under-pressure-talking-a-lot makes me think of them. As David Gilmour would say, “it was a serious heterosexual guy” play.

I do remember that we sat in the back row and that afterwards we went on the London Eye. Also, I can remember every phone number I’ve ever had. Also, I can remember who “we” was. So that’s a win.

She, the Boss, and I had procured a Groupon for a two-night stay at a ski resort about two hours from here. In the summer it turns into a hiking-fishing-golf resort. The Groupon covered the shoulder season, when it’s too late to ski, but it’s too early to fish. But we didn’t care because our criteria for a getaway were: 1. Get. 2. Away.

However! Our supercheap Groupon only got us a ground floor one-bedroom suite. When I called, I dutifully asked, “Is there any chance we could get a terrace or a balcony or anything?”

I had a little moment here, a little pause in my soul. I knew I had to channel my inner cheapskate/complainer because otherwise I would have Lulu to answer to. The problem is, I cannot tell a lie. The reality was, it wasn’t actually a lie—it was complicated. But complicated = hard to explain. And did I mention that I cannot tell a lie?

The Boss had not actually started her chemo yet. She was going to be in the thick of it when we arrived at the resort, and we didn’t know how it was going to go. I started to imagine The Worst Case Scenario. (Because I’m very good at imagining The Worst Case Scenario. It’s one of my inborn talents.) Then I started talking.

“Yeah, see, so this is a girls’ getaway weekend, and one of the girls is undergoing chemotherapy, and she gets really sick, (and by “gets” I mean “might get”) so we were thinking it would be great if there was a way to bring the outdoors to her without her having to like, walk down several flights of stairs.”

Very Nice Phone Man then said, “I got you covered!”

Me: “Really?”

VNPM: We are all about making accommodations for people here. Let me see what I can do. [Pause for typing noises.] OK, I’ve got a great room for you with a balcony.

Me: Thanks!

VNPM: Wait, wait! I can do better than that! [Pause for typing noises.] OK, you have a room with the best view in the place.

Me: Thank you so much!

VNPM: I have to write something on the reservation. What should I write? I’m thinking I should just write, “chemotherapy?”

Me: I think that sounds totally reasonable.

Fast forward six weeks. The Boss and I are a few miles from the resort. Lulu is meeting us later. The “problem” is that although chemo has been excruciating, the Boss has handled it with her usual aplomb/courage/kick-assedness. She doesn’t look sick enough to justify the special treatment.

“OK,” I say, “here’s the thing. In order to get us a balcony, I had to, like, explain a few things to them.”

“You played the cancer card?”

“I played the cancer card.”

Happily, the Boss is totally in favour of playing the cancer card. And, really, why the hell not? Can I just say for the record that if you’ve never had cancer or watched someone close to you have it, CANCER SUCKS ASS WAY MORE THAN IT DOES ON TV?

“So,” I said, “the thing is, you need to look sort of…sick. Like, enough to justify the balcony. I might have told them that you can’t walk up and down stairs. I might have made a little speech about bringing nature to you.”

The Boss was all over it. She grabbed my arm and I “helped” her walk up the desk. We approached slowly, We tried not to laugh. We started to check in, and OMG, then she started freestyling.

I had pulled out my “It’s girls’ weekend!” card and was attempting to make small talk with the Desk Clerk Who Was Not the Very Nice Phone Man. (I had, irrationally, hoped that Very Nice Phone Man would be working at the desk. But it’s a ginormous resort with a bunch of different properties, and, probably, a call centre in Chennai.)

Somehow the talk jokingly turned toward how we’re going to be painting the town red. [Editor’s note: we stayed up till 10 pm the first night and 11 pm the second. Eleven was a stretch.] The Boss comes out with, sotto voce, “Well, you girls will have so much fun! I wish I could come with you!”

“Yes,” I said, picking up her cue, “But we’ll come back and trash the room like an 80s hair metal band, and you can participate in that.”

My friends, we got to our room, and not only did it include a balcony, but it was a two-bedroom suite on the top floor. They had surprise-upgraded us. And it really did have the best view in the place. Thank you, Very Nice Phone Man. No, seriously: thank you. We had more fun than you can probably conceive of. I would post the karaoke videos, but…not so much.

This is the part where it starts to sound like this post is sponsored by Blue Mountain Resort (I wish!). But honestly, from the first call to book the Groupon (Hi, Mr. Very Nice Phone Man!) to everyone we encountered there, they could not have been nicer or more helpful. The whole experience caused me to Google their corporate shit. I don’t know, these Intrawest people have some serous customer service good karma going on. (But then again, they’re getting their payback because we’ve already vowed to make it an annual thing. And a girl only has so many cancer cards to play.)

The moral of the story: I played the cancer card. I guess. But there really was cancer, and three girls spent two days having the time of our lives. So: Blue Mountain? THANKS. Breast Cancer? FUCK OFF.

It’s possible that you are having more fun than I am right now, but I doubt it.

Please imagine the 1980s Price is Right ladies. Dian, Holly, and the other one whose name I can’t remember. They are waving their hands around, and you are in awe of their sparkly dresses and their perfect claw bangs.

They are showing you the first showcase! It contains: a homemade gluten-free coconut cream pie made for you by an awesome coworker, and a glass (or three) pink wine. (It is a dry rosé. It is classy. You might think the Price is Right ladies would be exactly the type to try to serve you a white zin, but you would be wrong.) You bid: A LOT OF MONEY.

Next, the second showcase! It contains: a trip for your three-year-old to his grandparents’ house! A three day weekend for you! Just so we’re all clear: three days with no work and no child. You bid: 800 MILLION DOLLARS.

Teff Grain. It’s so good. I use it as a hot breakfast cereal and mix it with a little natural honey, cinnamon, raisins, berries, etc. I was reading more about it and it said “Many of Ethiopia’s famed long-distance runners attribute their energy and health to teff.”

So I conclude that if we eat it, we’ll be like Ethiopian runners, but in Canada.

So I just moved up to five-minute running intervals and called Lulu to complain about it. I got this voicemail in return.

Hi! It’s me! Oh my God, I’m so out of the loop with everything. I’m trying to get organized with my life. Yeah, I just went from the minute-and-a-half intervals to the three minute intervals. [She pauses for maniacal laughter.] I thought there was something wrong with my phone because I wasn’t prepared for it. I’m always like, ‘press a button, put my headphones on, and go.’ So I was very confused and thought I was dying.

I’m super nervous about the five minutes. But good for you, man, you’re like my superhero.

OK, call me when you can. I don’t really have any other news. I’m just sitting still here for a second and enjoying a beverage. OK, bye.

Remember how Lulu and I are training for a 5K? (And how the Boss—the cancer patient—is training for a half marathon? Hey, some of us were born great. Some of us have to work really hard for mediocrity.)

So we’re using this Couch to 5K app, which is basically a run-walk interval program. You run, you walk, you run, you walk. As you progress, the running intervals get longer, and the walking intervals get shorter. A nice lady turns down your music and says, “Now run! You’re doing great!” She’s very soothing and even-toned, this lady. It’s kind of disconcerting: she turns down my Gaga and announces, “Brisk walk!”

Really, it should be the reverse. Lady Gaga needs to record one of these apps. Imagine: At the appropriate time, Gaga rips though your brain shrieking, “You’re a freak bitch, baby! RUN!!!!!”

There are a zillion versions of this app, and I ask you in all seriousness, why not a Lady Gaga one? Somebody should run with this. No pun intended. (This is just like the time I invented that banana Tupperware thing in my head and then ten years later someone actually made it.) Come on, Gaga, come on, venture capitalists of the world: Mediocre girls everywhere need you.

We were dancing, Lulu, the Boss, and I. Because that’s what you do when you’re hanging out with your girlfriends and you have a get of jail/parenting card. The Boss said something about her bald head. It was semi-self-deprecating.

“Do you know what you look like to me? Lulu asked the Boss. “You look like a goddess.”

I had to agree.

A couple weeks later, the Boss and I went to the Keg (If you’re in the US, know that the Keg=semi-cheesy Canadian steak franchise. But expensive enough that you feel kind of classy). We took a picture which I can’t post because I don’t generally post identifying pictures here, but also because in front of me you can see 1) a “Keg-sized” glass of wine, and 2) a giant vat of butter for me to dip my crab into. (“Dip my crab into” should be a metaphor for something untoward, but I assure you it is not. I was literally dipping my crab.) There are only so many receptacles of yellow liquid a lady can countenance being photographed with.

The Boss had a hot flash. Who knew that was a side effect of chemo? Five to ten years of fake menopause, which ends just in time for the real thing!

“I’m going to have to take off my head scarf,” she said. “Is that OK with you?”

I sort of loved that she asked my permission. I was like, “Hells, yes! Take it off! Take it all off!”

This was the same lady who a few months ago was all, “I am not OK with being a person with cancer.” And yet, tonight, she was smoking. The makeup, the outfit–she had it going on. She just didn’t have any hair. It made her even hotter, in a “I am ripping up a picture of the Pope in front of you motherfuckers” sort of way.

The funny thing is, the Boss has this killer wig. It is to die for. I tried it on once, and I’m telling you, I have never looked so good. I’ve seen that wig a whole bunch of times, but never on the Boss’s head out in the world. I think this is telling. I think the Boss is braver than she thinks she is.

Wigs are hot and uncomfortable. So, apparently, are head scarves when you’re having a hot flash.

So she pulled it off. We were sitting at the bar. Then we went to a show (more on this later!). The Boss stayed bald the whole damn time. As we were walking from the restaurant to the show, she said, “Watch, watch how people stare at me.”

It was true.

I defended them. “Of course they’re looking at you. Who wouldn’t look at you? Think about it: you’re walking down the street, you’re on your way home, and all of a sudden this beautiful bald lady is in front of you. How can you not stare?”

My defense was heartfelt, but man, did they stare. Worst was the 30-to-40-something men. They seemed to be riveted to their phones, but then they’d look–just for a second–and then they were back to their phones. But the look–the look was killer.

“Do you know what you look like to me? Lulu asked the Boss, back when we were just dancing in our hotel room. “You look like a goddess.”

Yes, I thought. This is EXACTLY what a goddess looks like. Everyone is staring at her because how can they not? But also, SHE is staring at them. She is saying, “I’m hot, and I don’t want to wear my wig or my headscarf, and if you want to stare at me as a result, knock yourself out and BEHOLD ME.”

I might as well have been walking down the street with Kali. I learned about her in yoga teacher training. She’s the goddess of war and destruction, dark and violent and fierce. But also of life and creation, because you can’t have one without the other, can you? There are 108 ways to say her name! It takes a long time to go through them. Here we see her standing on top of Shiva, who is usually considered the Main Destruction Dude. (Because, you know, boys write history. And mythology But I digress.) Also, she is blue, so you would probably stare at her if you saw her sitting at the bar at the Keg.

“You look like a goddess to me!” Exactly. I just hope we can all remember, later, when everyone is healthy and distracted, what it’s like to be a goddess. Or what it’s like to walk down the street with one.

Unfortunately, we were halfway up a mountain at the time. A mountain made of mud. Hiking: it seemed like a good idea at the time.

“I could get dizzy and fall. And then I’d get a cut, and because I basically have no white blood cells, I could get an infection and die. Also, my heart is beating really fast, and I think I might have a heart attack.”

I turns out that when you’re going though chemo, climbing a mountain isn’t maybe the best idea. Especially when you’re halfway to the top when this occurs to you.

So we sat on a log, and we looked at the vista. And Lulu and I told the Boss our big news: we’re running the Scotiabank 5K in the fall in her honour. Of course, she’s running the freaking half marathon (TWO MONTHS after her last surgery) but, hey, for Lulu and me, a 5K is a commitment. Then we talked about side stitches and shin splints and run-walk intervals. We sounded very impressive. Also, a few tears might have been shed.

And then we went back down. Slowly. And not because of any chemo-induced fatigue, but because that dang mountain really was made of mud.

“I had to double up on how much I smoked because there was a kid crying in the parking lot, and it gave me PTSD.”

“Have some Bailey’s because it has milk in it.” (To the Boss, who asked if anyone had any antacids.)

While drinking wine directly from the bottle: “Is this what alcoholics feel like? This is why I don’t drink.” The Boss: “Alcoholics don’t drink rosé, dear.”

[Editor’s note: this makes it seem like all we did was drink. But really, we brought an ungodly amount of booze up with us and we returned with…an ungodly amount of booze. And we managed to stay up all the way till 10 pm the first night….and 11 pm the second night. So, basically Lulu is all talk. Which you already knew.]

“OK,” said Lulu as she came into the spacious (upgraded! but that’s another post!) suite she, the Boss, and I are sharing for the weekend. “I have an idea to discuss with you girls. But we’re not going to talk about it now. I don’t want to do a big lead-up because it’s not that great of an idea, but we’re going to talk about it later.”

This is where I’ll be 24 hours from now. Without my child. Happy Mother’s Day.

The phone rang at work, and when I picked it up I heard this:

“Don’t give me too many details about your life or else we won’t have anything to talk about this weekend—because we’re BORING!”

It was Lulu, doing the Lulu-shriek-talking. She, the Boss, and I are headed out of town for a little weekend getaway we like to call MOTHER’S DAY WITH NO CHILDREN.

Spa-ing, hiking, riding down some kind of crazy slide down the side of a mountain. My only regret is that the zipline where they let you go tethered together with two friends isn’t yet open for the season.

I tried to give Lulu the directions, because she’s meeting the Boss and me there, and she said, “Look, I’m just going to drive north and when I get close, I’m going to pull over and start texting you guys.”

“The weather is supposed to be bad,” I’d remarked in an email exchange earlier.

“That’s OK,” Lulu wrote.

That just means more time for the free entertainment show and earlier drinks. We could spend the whole weekend locked in a car and we’d still have fun—as long as it doesn’t get too hot. PS. I hate typing now since there is no auto correct – can’t they set that up on my computer?

What is this “free entertainment show” she speaks of, you might ask. Is it going to be like in Dirty Dancing, when you go to the resort and they put on a show in the dining hall and then later you “make friends” with one of the dancers and he helps you find your true awesome self and also you pioneer the unfortunate trend of rolled up cut off jean shorts?

No, the “free entertainment show” is merely Lulu’s unceasing colour commentary on life.

“OK!” she said as we were preparing to hang up. “You two–don’t talk about too much in the car! Talk about kids in the car!”

We capped off a glorious weekend starring Lily with a trip to the beach. Last time Lily and I went to the beach, we were young(er) and in Florida. I got up early and strolled, we rendezvoused in the middle of the day, and after I went to bed, Lily went moonbathing. As usual, on this trip, Lily’s nocturnal tendencies were in evidence. Saturday night, long after the Baby Goth had sent Mr. Mock and me to bed exhausted, Lily prowled the neighbourhood. She found an off track betting establishment, at which she wagered four dollars on a horse race taking place in Japan. Then she stumbled onto Orthodox Easter midnight services. You know, just a night in the life.

When you go to the beach with Lily, she makes a graveyard.

When the Babygoth goes to the beach, he just builds a sand castle. Obviously, he still has a lot to learn.

See this one here? White graves at about five o’clock are graves of fallen soldiers. Twelve o’clock is the rich people, who can afford fancy, multi-coloured marble. Ten o’clock = old section, where the graves are weathering. And of course the big honking stone is for the town’s founder.

I M thinking of coming up there on May 3 if U R around. I wanna C U and yr artist kid B4 he grows up and becomes the next Basquiat and I have 2 wait in line at the Pace Gallery 2 talk him 4 30 secondz. let me know if that date sux tho.

p.s. we went 2 a nite last week at some loft and got 2 stand on a guy rolled up in a carpet while we ordered our drinks. I wish I could have magically made U appear just 2 get a good look at it and then bought u a lemon drop.

And where is she staying? Why, the Twilight Parlour Room at the Gladstone, of course.

(For one night, then she’s coming to my house where she belongs.) Lily has been trying to get the Twilight Parlour Room for YEARS and she always ends with a room that has a fake forest in it or something similarly offensive.

Note the neon. Did you know that Lily is learning to make neon signs? Like, in her free time. She is trying to further her dream of opening a store that sells only black floral arrangements and white neon. “I need 2 focus here,” she says about her new career trajectory, “or I’m gonna B 42 with nothing 2 show 4 it but a catalog of crazy jobs, no lasting contribution 2 anything worthwhile, and a houseful of furniture I swiped off the street.”

“OMG!” Lulu squealed. “Pink! I love you, but I’ve failed you! I’ll never be a backup dancer for you now.”

Lulu, the Boss, and I were watching Pink’s Grammy performance of Glitter in the Air. She and her dancers are on this ribbony trapeze thing way above the audience. At this moment, Lulu had to give up her dreams of backup dancer stardom.

The setting: a slumber party. Pink drinks were being consumed, because it’s a proven scientific fact that pink drinks enhance Pink. It’s also a proven scientific fact that pink drinks cushion the blow when one sees one’s career ambitions go up in smoke.

“She looks like Mary, Mother of Jesus,” I said. “But with glitter.”

“The three kings,” said the Boss, taking a sip. “They brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh. I bet they brought glitter, too.”

Maybe they brought glitter and pink drinks. The third item was probably a massage therapist. It’s very likely it just got lost in translation.

“There’s a discrepancy,” said the Boss. “There’s a discrepancy between what I think and what I actually am.”

This post is about cancer, Chicklets. This post is no fun. We’re all about the “mock” here at Mock Chicken, but you can only mock cancer so much before you start to sound like an idiot. You have to recognize its power over you, if only metaphorically. They start to come at you with Stage X, blah, blah, invasive, blah, blah, and the smart thing to do is to listen to the doctors, to listen to the People Who Know. It’s important to do that.

But it’s also important to listen to your heart.

When the Boss was first diagnosed, she talked about starting her own blog. We talked about various titles and subtitles. DARK PINK was one of them, because though she was down with the whole “I’m fighting cancer” thing, she wasn’t so sure it was all going to be all daffodils and pink ribbons. I like to think, invoking Lily, that she was finding her goth self. Then we thought of BITE ME, CANCER.

Wait. You can’t say that. It turns out that having cancer isn’t a black and white thing. There is no line in the sand where on one side you’re sick and on the other—congratulations!—you’re cancer-free. It turns out that anywhere you have to fill out a form—at a spa, for instance—there is just a single box marked CANCER.

She has a point. The word “CANCER” with a check box? “Yes! Every time I close my eyes, I think of you!” Or, perhaps, “No thanks, I think I’ll pass!

But what if you can’t? What if it’s already there, lurking despite your half marathons and your organic vegetables?

Then, I’m sorry to say, you’re fucked. Yes, there might be a silver lining, and I’ll get to that—we’ll end with that, for sure, but you people with the daffodils, you can pretty much go shove them up your ass.

Just to clarify: I don’t mean “you’re fucked,” in the “you’re dead” sense. I mean “you’re fucked” in the “now you are going to have to confront everything you thought you were and everything you thought was true” sense.

“There’s a discrepancy,” said the Boss. “There’s a discrepancy between what I think and what I actually am.”

Yes. This is true for all of us, is it not? But if you’re looking at yourself in the mirror and you have no hair and you haven’t been at work for five months, it’s a little more true.

“I’m not good at being with myself,” says the Boss. The honesty of this simple sentence hits me in the gut. I think I went to a year of yoga teacher training that cost several thousand dollars to come to this same realization. And I’m not trying to be glib here, I’m just breathless at the raw truth of the statement.

Lulu, the Boss, and I have spent a lot of time talking about what no one should never have to talk about: how to be honest with one’s children but not scare them. This is what it all boils down to, is it not? It might be as visceral as, “I have cancer,” but it might also be as seemingly simple as, “I’m not going to let the monsters come into your bedroom while you’re sleeping.” The difference is that she says the former and I say the latter—my son’s fears have to do with monsters raising his blinds—but what if the two are the same thing? How do you promise your children that cancer is not going to get you? You can’t. You have your statistics, and the statistics might be very much in your favour, but, ultimately, you can’t. And that’s scary. You frame it to be all about the kids, but it’s all so motherfucking scary. You’re supposed to say, “I don’t want to scare my kids,” and we get that, but maybe what we’re also saying is, “I don’t want to be this scared.”

When you’re young and you have cancer, no one wants to accept it. They’re all, “My friend who had breast cancer when she was 39 had a mastectomy and…blah, blah…” All I can really think to say is that cancer doesn’t give a shit how old you are. It is indifferent to your story, to your suffering. It is the great equalizer: it doesn’t care if you are 36 or 76. You can buy a hundred self-help books and none of it makes a difference. None of it is any truer than what you already know in your heart: this might get you. Maybe now, maybe later. Maybe NEVER, but you never know. And because you never know, it’s in charge, forever.

So you have your mastectomy. You have your chemo. You take your drugs. You are a “survivor.” But I think (and this is just me talking, I’m not putting words in the Boss’s mouth—I’m just projecting) that the awful/amazing thing about cancer, is that it makes you face your worst fear. And your worst fear, it turns out, isn’t a single thing. It’s everything mixed together. It’s: “how do I be by myself?” mixed with “what do I tell my kids?” mixed with “Do I check yes or no when they give me the ‘cancer’ box at the spa?” And that’s the thing about cancer: it’s not linear. It’s everything all at once. It’s too much.

I wish I had a clever ending. Sometimes I like to circle back to how I started, which is this case is:

“There’s a discrepancy,” said the Boss. “There’s a discrepancy between what I think and what I actually am.”

But I don’t think that’s actually true. I think the Boss is exactly who she’s always been. She’s facing cancer with the same relentless introspection she brings to everything. It’s just that this is harder. Much, much harder. If there’s a discrepancy there, it’s a version of the same discrepancy we all have, whether we acknowledge it or not. The difference is that she’s narrowing hers, much faster than the rest of us. She’s burning off the bullshit. The flames are cleansing, but they also hurt like hell.

Three years ago, I gave birth to a small human being I like to call The Baby Goth. From the moment BG was able to express preferences, he informed us his favourite colour was black. Except for that one time when I mistakenly referred to “black” as his favourite colour in conversation, and he corrected me, pointing out that his favourite colour had in fact changed to “dark black.” I kid you not. Last time we went to the pediatrician, they put him in “the blue room.” Because the rooms are colour-coded! Because kids like colours, right? Well, BG, while we were waiting for the doctor, said, “They should have a black room. Black is my colour.” Still not kidding.

These are the pictures he brings home from day care.

We all know whose fault this is, right? Yes, from her roost in New York, it appears that Lily has put the whammy on my child. In her defense, he expressed this preference independent of her, but the girl is now fanning the flames as rigorously as she can without getting a tan.

For example: For Christmas, she sent him a package of crayons that contained only black crayons. The fact that she did this by buying eight packages of crayons, taking the single black crayon out of each and uniting them in one package of dark splendour, and then doctoring the outside of the package so that the image showed only black crayons, is amazing. There was also black play-doh. And last week, black M&Ms.

How does she do it?

Lily once told me that I was goth inside. Somewhere under all the pink clothing and relentless optimism, beats the heart of a tortured poet, was the argument. I do like Chekov, like A LOT, so maybe she has a point. Anyway, I took it as a compliment. And if BG grows up to be as much of a superstar as Lily, I’ll be lucky, lucky, lucky.

I love that I send naked Adam Levine pictures as inspiration and you send lovely, moving literary masterpieces. I will continue to send pictures of Adam Levine naked as that’s how I roll.

A note from The Boss. She and Lulu and I have been trading bits of inspiration over e-mail as fuel for some difficult times. We have different ideas about what’s inspiring OBVIOUSLY. This is the first and last time that Adam Levine will be mentioned here, because that’s how I roll.

“I don’t want to look like a hobo,” said Lulu, looking around to see if anyone was watching before dumping her coffee on the ground.

Lulu, the Boss, and I were communing with nature. It was item #1 on the agenda of the 24-hour girlfest slumber party extravaganza that had just gotten underway.

Before communing with nature we went through the Tim Horton’s drive through. At our destination—a little forest reserve thing near the Boss’s house—the Boss produced some Bailey’s and proceeded to spike our coffees. Because we all know communing with nature is enhanced by Bailey’s Irish Cream. (Bailey’s Irish Cream is not paying me for this post. But they should be.)

Did you know that if you put chickadee feed on your palm and hold it out, actual living chickadees will land on you and eat out of your hand? This, the Boss assured us, was supposed to be an exciting prospect. So exciting that she produced about 10 pounds of birdfeed from her handbag (a handbag being another thing that enhances nature communing).

When Lulu and I sipped our doctored coffee and shook our heads, the Boss was indignant. “Are you kidding me? They land on your HAND, you guys! It’s awesome.”

“When I go to hell and they make me push large a boulder up a hill for all eternity, they’ll also make me do it one handed so that WILD BIRDS can land on my free arm,” I said.

So Lulu and I huddled a safe distance away while the Boss fed the birds. The Boss wins the communing award, for sure.

Lulu was the first-runner-up communer, though, when a few minutes later she was attacked by a squirrel. It ran up her leg. For real. “No word of a lie,” as Lulu herself would say. The only reason Lulu doesn’t take first prize is because her communing was of the involuntary sort.

After the screaming was over, Lulu was more philosophical. “I’m delicious,” she explained, when we asked why she thought the squirrel had so decidedly targeted her. “I’m full of sugar and chocolate at all times, so why shouldn’t I be?”

When we got back to the car, Lulu didn’t want her coffee any more. “Just dump it on the grass,” said the Boss.

“I don’t want to look like a hobo,” said Lulu, who apparently thinks that the vagabondily-inclined are known for dumping their coffee on the ground.

“This grass is dry,” I pointed out, because I like to be helpful. “It could use some liquid.” So Lulu dumped her Bailey’s-laced coffee.

Then we packed the car with nine pounds of birdfeed and went home to commune with Wii Just Dance 4, where I played Patrick Swayze, the Boss played Jennifer Gray, and Lulu provided the color commentary. “I had the time of my life,” the song goes. Totally.

“I might as well be injecting meth,” said Lulu, who was smoking an “adult cigarette” in her garage, dressed in her husband’s bathrobe and wearing a shower cap.

If you remember the original Mock Chicken, I should tell you that Lulu is no longer in the city with me. Alas, she moved, and is now about two hours away, in a quaint little town famous for its Mennonite community. Some of them ride around in buggies and wear traditional dress, though most don’t. It’s the “most don’t” contingent that worries Lulu. “They’re everywhere!” she says. “And they want to steal your soul.”

I need to set the record straight here. Lulu is maybe a twice a year smoker of adult cigarettes, which, I hasten to add are PERFECTLY (sort of) legal here in Canada. I cannot join her, because inhaling anything into my lungs besides fresh air and, like, the bus exhaust of my mega-urban street, gives me a panic attack.

So on our last visit/slumber party, Lulu had me all set up. “Have a seat,” she said, ushering me into the garage, where she had set up two camp chairs. A bottle of wine had been uncorked for me.

“I’ll be right back,” she said. “Have a drink.”

We were in the garage because of the aforementioned soul stealers. Lulu felt that the eighth of an inch of daylight between the edge of her blinds and the window well might be playing host to some of her neighbours’ eyeballs, and so she’d planned a retreat to the garage.

I sipped my Chardonnay and she reappeared looking like a cross between the ghost of Christmas Past and a beauty school drop out.

The robe—her husband’s—was so large that it pooled on the floor and covered her hands. Charles Dickens could have stashed not only Ignorance and Want there, but there would also have been room for Overindulgence and Maybe Just One More, But Only If You Insist, Thanks. Between it and the shower cap, only her face was showing. It turns out that although Lulu enjoys the occasional adult cigarette, she doesn’t enjoy the lingering smell.

“I might as well be injecting meth!” she shrieked, taking a puff and looking around as if she expected a horse and buggy bearing an unmerciful neighbour to come charging through.

Well, no. But Lulu is prone to hyperbole and that’s why we love her. How lucky are we to sit back and sip our Chardonnay and bask in her paranoid glory?

So, when a man and a woman come into your dealership together and say they want to test drive a car, it’s a good idea to notice that the woman is, in fact, able to speak. I suggest noticing the plural pronoun she deploys when she opens the conversation by saying “Hi, we have an appointment to test drive a car.” Maybe she is even asking you questions and telling you that she thinks your car is roomier but that she likes the mileage better on THE OTHER CAR SHE IS THINKING OF BUYING. Because when you step over her to hand your clipboard to the man and tell him you’ll need his driver’s license if he wants to test drive the car, she is going to be displeased. And then she is going to GO BUY THE OTHER CAR SHE IS THINKING OF BUYING.

Un, hi. Remember how we were going to take a little break, and that was, like, 2006? When the Internet was a mere teenager and social media the screaming infant it had because it was too young and impulsive to know about birth control?

Since we last saw each other, I did a few things. I had a baby. I wrote some books. I got a literary agent. More on all this later. Maybe. (Because remember, this isn’t a blog about my day-to-day doings: that would be excruciating for all of us, right?)

The most important thing I have to report is that Lulu and Lily are still…not hiding their lights under a bushel, shall we say?

Lulu: “I drove all the way here with my pants unbuttoned and unzipped.”

Me: “Touché.”

And here’s an update from Lily:

All I have done lately over here is sell stuff on eBay bcuz I’m convinced that either I’m going 2 get fired, or quit my job in a fit of white-hot rage. Do U think the $2 armwarmers I posted will tide me over until I can get another job?:D I’m sure of it! In other news, there is no other news. Unless U count the fact that I M now addicted 2 Upstairs Downstairs AND Downton Abbey AND Eastenders. U would think one show where the rich chick bangs the chauffeur and comes 2 no good end would B enough, but apparently not.

Okay, Chicklets, as much as it pains me to say this, I think it’s time for us to start seeing other people. It’s not you, it’s me.

Seriously, I think it’s time to call a spade a spade and declare a little rest. I need to stop mining the world for Mock Chicken-worthy vignettes and start paying attention to the long-neglected narrative in my head that, with much slogging, may someday become a novel.

I know you’ll understand, because that’s the kind of girlfriend you are.

Is this goodbye forever? I think not. If you want, drop me a line at info@mockchicken.com and I’ll send out a note when I’m done sowing my wild oats and ready to settle down again, a.k.a., when I start posting again.

How was Montreal? Simply divine, thanks, though our allegedly four-star hotel was a little lacking in terms of actually being star-worthy. The art over Lily’s bed had been stolen and some damaged bolts left behind. The “kitchenette” we’d been promised was absent, so Lily went down to the front desk and told them she needed a fridge to store her insulin (read: vodka) so they brought an alarmingly large one up for us on a dolly. Of course there were no outlets in our four-star room, so they had to squish it in between Lily’s bed and the vanity.

But what are stars, Chicklets, when you’re blinded by the star power of Lily?

And here’s Lily’s report, sent upon her return to New York.

1) they took my 30 dollar sunscreen at the airport on the way home. It was .1 ounces over the size limit. I felt better when I saw all the liquor they made off with. Some TSA officer is probably sunning himself out on the tarmac right now, slathered with Docotors Dermatological Formula and drinking a magnum of duty-free Moet.

5) I’m glad U made me buy that hoodie, cause I’m gonna need it 2 hide my identity when I wait in line 4 10 hours with a bunch of 13-year-olds 2 C MCR next week. On a workday. In my neighborhood. In PUBLIC.

6) I had the most awsome time ever! Thank U 4 meeting me even though U were sick! I heart U so much I would let U have Gerard if he were mine!

2. This will allow Lily to stalk the lead singer of Priestess on his home turf.

3. We hotwired a swish downtown hotel that will make us feel like Eloise at the Plaza (R.I.P.).

4. What better way to give thanks than to lounge with your oldest friend in a city that’s appealingly unfamiliar to you? It feels like the world is yours, like all things are possible, and that you’re well-partnered for any crimes you might like to commit.

Lily sent me this note as she prepared to depart:

Here’s my itinerary, just in case U care. Also attached is a picture of who I want 2 french me in the coffin in case my plane crashes. Mais (french!) I will C U 4 sure at the Hyatt bar at about 3pm stat on Friday! I’ll have my cell and I’m sure I’ll call and annoy U anyway. I can’t wait! I hope U brought a bikini cause I did. I look like a cheese attached 2 a couple of hams in it, but I don’t care. I can’t wait! Have a safe trip on the train and see if THEY have a bar! Kissy! XOXOL

So my new entrepreneurial fantasy is to start a web site that specializes in matchmaking boys who read novels and girls (and boys) who would like to date boys who read novels. If you read the very smart comments posted to my entry about how boys apparently don’t read fiction any more, you will see why this is such an opportunity.[Update: Sadly, none of the comments survived the transition to the new platform.]

My original plan was to buy the domain www.boyswhoreadnovels.com. But when you look at that the world “whore” just jumps out at you, doesn’t it? And that’s just not the vibe I’m going for. The obvious alternative is www.boysthatreadnovels.com but that’s not grammatically correct and we can’t have that. Then there’s www.novelreadingboys.com, but it just doesn’t have the same zing.

The other problem is what to do about, as the Beach Boys said, the “two girls for every boy” problem. If you believe the statistics, boys who read novels are rare, which is of course why the girls I know want to date them. But maybe if you’re just upfront about the skewed fishpond to begin with, that’s honest enough, isn’t it?

I can see the entries now. Vital stats, instead of being height, weight, blah, blah, are: the last book you read, the last book you abandoned, the book that’s been sitting on your bedside table for a year. Photos not allowed unless boy is pictured with book.

Lily used to make fun of me because I used to have a special fondness for boys who read books while walking down the street. It was like they couldn’t be bothered to stop reading while getting from point A to point B, which, come on, is very appealing. Members of this sub-group, however, are usually not reading novels. They’re usually reading Marx. And that’s just not attractive.

“Look at the youth,” said Lulu, waving her arms around as if there were youth to be seen, as we sat in her office. She was trying to convince me not to get my new jeans shortened. They were slightly longer than I wanted them to be, so they kind of runched up at the bottom. “Look at their jeans.”

“Jeans are like curtains,” she said. “They’re supposed to come to the floor. And anyway, there’s nothing worse than a woman in heels whose jeans are too short.”

Here at Mock Chicken we like to take a sassy approach when misogyny rears its ill-styled head. We’re always on guard, of course, because we believe that the woman-haters in our midst can masquerade as any number of respectable sorts and that they require our scrutiny. But we generally feel like our righteous indignation is best served up with a laugh or at least a little sarcasm, if only because people who are serious all the time are tremendously tedious and the last thing we want people to say at our funeral is, well, what a relief.

Sometimes, though, misogyny isn’t subtle, there to be ferreted out with a wink. Sometimes it’s so heavy-handed that it’s almost a parody of itself. This was certainly the case in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, yesterday. I read in the Times that as the Amish prepare to bury their daughters Naomi Rose, Anna Mae, Marian, Mary Liz, and Lena, they are stoic and not angry. I wonder how this can be.

I thought about this all day, and was oddly buoyed when I read that they gave out the Nobel prize in physics today to John Mather and George Smoot who measured the oldest light in the universe, light from 380,000 years after the Big Bang (which was itself about 14 billion years ago). Apparently they effectively verified the Big Bang Theory. People are capable of amazing and ingenious things. It’s good to remember this.

Check out this interesting essay, Why Hemingway is Chick-Lit about the alleged gender gap in fiction-reading. I shouldn’t say alleged because it seems to be a fact that women read fiction and men don’t. Women make up 88 per cent of readers of general interest fiction and top men, though not so dramatically, in genres like science fiction and mysteries. The question, of course, is why this is so, and what it means for fiction writing. I was surprised by these figures, though they are certainly borne out in my immediate family. The girls read fiction and the boys read non-fiction. The essay surveys lots of explanatory theories, but I think what’s more important is not what this means for gender relations or even what it means for fiction reading/writing/marketing, but what it means for boys. Not reading fiction surely must stunt you somehow. I’m not being coy; I really think you walk around the world with a great gaping deficit in your soul if you eschew fiction.

Where have I been? That’s a good question. Trying to Write Other Things, Chicklets. Not that there’s anything more important than you. In the meantime, don’t you wish you had written the first paragraph of this essay by Garrison Keillor?

My latest 60-second crush struck at a Diane Arbus exhbition at the Walker Art Centre in Minnepolis. We all know Diane Arbus for her pictures of freaks, right? Literally mid-century circus freaks and also assorted oddballs like female impersonators and the children of the extremely rich. But who knew that she took way more photos of ordinary New Yorkers? Except under her eye they manage to be both ordinary and slightly off — so much so that the freaks start to look normal and you start to get the creeps from the happy couples in Central Park.

This was the setting for my latest 60-second crush. I was on vacation, so I went on a weekday, thinking I’d drift idly through that and other exhibtions, unbothered by crowds. My prediction mostly came true, except that there was an entire school in attendance. Teenagers were everywhere, giggling at the tattooed lady and the naked midgets, but you could tell that some of them were secretly blown away by this sudden prospect of a whole other world where the camera gazed on everyone with the same cold eye, irrespective of sex, weight, amount of facial hair, or degree of beauty.

A tall lanky boy was crouched in a corner, as far from his classmates as he could possibly be. He was sitting on some steps and writing in a journal, furiously. He had on black pants, a dress shirt with a t-shirt over it, and–wait for it–one perfect long rosary around his neck. Oh, it slayed me.

Realizing that my latet 60-second crush had deposited me into the realm of the illegal, I moved on, to another exhibtion, by this guy called Cameron Jamie, who was not unlike Diane Arbus in that he was interested in the fringy subcultures of our day. He took photos and drew pictures of teenage wrestlers and people who put on haunted houses in New Jersey. One part of this exhibition was a mountain that you had to walk into — a room that had been outfitted so you felt like you were entering a cave. There was a path and some rock walls that quickly gave way to darkness. They gave you a flashlight but as you peeped in all you could see was pitch black. They told you that there were certain “works” inside. But they only let you go in one at a time. Not that I had anyone there with me to go mountaineering with, but the fact that they made you go it alone (and there was a guard there enforcing it) simultanously freaked me out and impressed the hell out of me. It was so dark that I had a little panic attack and didn’t go in. On my way home I thought:

1. Wow, there didn’t even have to be anything inside: the whole thing was unsettling enough that it made its point. But I wish I had seen what WAS inside there.
2. I suck.
3. Rosary Boy would have gone in.

1. In the “justice has prevailed” category, I am happy to report that Presse Internationale carries soft-core gay porn. You may remember my trip to an outlet near my house to buy a copy of Out Magazine, which turned up 18 knitting magazines but not a copy of Out or The Advocate. You may remember my promise to investigate whether this was a Riverdale-related oversight or an instance of systemic bigotry. I’m happy to report that although the Bloor and Bathurst branch of Presse Internationale was sold out of Out, I was directed to some alternate titles featuring nearly-naked men on the cover. You can rest easy.

2. Also in the justice has prevailed category: Pluto gets taken down a notch. Well, finally. Didn’t I recommend this in the strongest possible terms?

3. Someone requested a photo of the double Ferris Wheel from the Minnesota State Fair. Here it is, though I have to protest that it goes really fast and so is much scarier in person. Lulu wouldn’t even go on it with me, so I had to take my Dad, who’s fearless. We also went on a roller coaster and in the row behind us was a girl of about 8 and her father. She spent the whole ride shrieking, “Dad! Dad! Dad!” and though I had twenty years on her, I was unable to speak. But I was saying the same thing in my heart.

Ode Magazine reports on a study that shows that having daughters makes you vote left-wing! Har! This reminds me of another recent study that showed that members of the U.S. Congress with daughters had voting records that were more favourable to women.

In this case, the researchers have shown that each daughter you have increases your tendency to vote for left-wing parties by two per cent. That’s four per cent in my family! Or 4.04 per cent if each daughter compounds separately! They say this is because parents want their children to be happy and prosperous and they see their daughters making less money than men and being disproportionately responsible for child raising and housework.

This explains why my mother always votes for Ralph Nader and also means that in the next election my father will have to sell his soul and vote for Hillary. (Right, Dad?)

You are well aware that Mock Chicken has a decidedly feminist sensibility, aren’t you, Chicklets? That’s only because it’s so breathtakingly easy to hate women these days.

So I did a little dance of joy today when my CNN breaking news alert informed me that fugitive polygamist Warren Jeffs had been apprehended near Las Vegas. The leader of a wing-nut breakaway Mormon sect, he’s charged with rape as an accomplice and lots of other things related to the “assigning” of hundreds of teenage girls to old men. I’d been interested in this story, but sure he’d slipped away forever.

Now, we’re very live-and-let-live here at Mock Chicken, and so we’re not opposed to unconventional relationships per se, as long as everyone’s enjoying herself and as long as there’s at least the theoretical possibility that one old lady can have seven teenage boys as “husbands.”

Other than that, we’re not very morally-relativistic and we say down with modern-day human trafficking. Really, can you think of anything more repugnant than taking a bright young human being, still mostly unformed but full of potential, capable of going in a million different directions, of becoming a million different things, and shackling her to an old man who will regard her as one of his stable in an arrangement putatively made in the name of God, foreclosing any of the possible things she might become? Certainly God or the universe can’t sanction this, and so whatever the F.B.I. has in mind for Mr. Jeffs in terms of extradition (Surprise! There’s competition; he’s wanted in multiple jurisdictions!), I am certain it pales in comparison to what is in store for him when his karmic number is up.

Lulu and I are going on vacay together, to the exotic locale of Hudson, Wisconsin, just outside the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, a.k.a., my homeland and the ever-present subject of my nostalgic fantasies.

It started when I was thinking of booking a spur-of-the-moment trip home because I missed my parents so much and I longed for the wide open skies and sparkling water of the St. Croix River valley, where they live. Airfares were suddenly on sale and my plan to save both my money and vacation days for a forthcoming trip with Lily to Las Vegas and with my mom to London was crumbling.

Lulu is super-busy at work and is in “don’t talk to me, man” mode when I call her. I am very familiar with this season at her office, having worked there for a couple years. It’s best just to back off, which I have done. The other day we were out with another pal for manicures at a salon that was having Madonna night—they paint your nails and bring you martinis while they play Madonna. (Oh sorry, is this a salon in Toronto? I thought it was heaven.)

Lulu was all, I think I need to book myself into a B&B and just go veg by myself for a few days. I was all for it and tried to encourage her. Not making the connection, I was all, yeah, I’m also feeling the sudden urge for a holiday and am thinking of going to see my parents, despite my protests that I wasn’t going to do that this summer.

“Maybe I can come with you,” said Lulu.

Well, of course that sealed the deal.

We booked it and then I got all excited because the visit will coincide with the Minnesota State Fair, which I say without boasting is the largest state fair in the U.S. You can eat any kind of food you can imagine deep-fried on a stick and you can look at cows raised by 4-H kids and you can visit the “modern living centre” to see the latest newfangled vacuum cleaner and you can go to the DFL booth and schmooze with the latest Democratic candidate for the state senate (or you can go to the IR booth and jeer the latest candidate for the state senate) and you can go on creaky rides run from the back of trucks operated by men with leather for skin. The highlight of the Fair for me was always the double Ferris Wheel. It’s hard to explain except to say that it’s exactly what it sounds like—two Ferris Wheels in one. Each wheel goes around on its own but both wheels also rotate around each other, like a binary star. It’s scary because it goes fast but it’s gentle because it’s a Ferris Wheel.

A few years ago I was reading a book called Leaving Home by Garrison Keillor, the writer and radio guy, who is pretty much my number one and enduring hero in life, and he had this to say about a trip to the Fair when he was young and forced to man the Christian Brethren booth and encouraged to avoid the temptations of the midway.

I went up in the Ferris Wheel for a last ride before being thrown into seventh grade. It went up into the stars and fell back to Earth and rose again, and I had a magnificent vision, or I think I did, though it’s hard to remember if that was the year with the chocolate cake or the next one with the pigs getting loose. The Ferris Wheel is the same year after year. It’s like all one ride to me: we go up and I think of the people I knew who are dead and I smell fall in the air, manure, corn dogs, and we drop down into blazing light and blaring music. Every summer I’m a little bigger, but riding the Ferris Wheel, I feel the same as ever, I feel eternal. The combination of cotton candy, corn dogs, diesel smoke, and sawdust, in a hot dark summer night, it never changes, not an inch. The wheel carries us up high, high, high, and stops, and we sit swaying, creaking, in the dark, on the verge of death. You can see death from here. The wind blows from the northwest, from the farm school in St. Anthony Park, a chilly wind with traces of pigs and sheep in it. This is my vision: little kids holding on to their daddy’s hand, and he is me. He looks down on them with love and buys them another corn dog. They are worried they will lose him, they hang on to his leg with one hand, eat with the other. This vision is unbearably wonderful. Then the wheel brings us down to the ground. We get off and other people get on. Thank you, dear God, for this good life, and forgive us if we do not love it enough.

Later, when he came to town to do a reading and book signing (for a much newer book) I stood in line and opened my book to page 115 and asked him to sign over the passage about the Ferris Wheel, which he did, but only after warning me about getting too nostalgic and romantically homesick for Minnesota and telling me to stay in Toronto.

So you can imagine my excitement over this little field trip with Lulu to my homeland. (Lily, hailing from Iowa and having lived for many years in Minnesota, gets all the shorthand). This was the context for a recent all-one-run-on-sentence-phone message from Lulu:

Hi. I’m bored. We’re going to go for a walk. Sean says I can’t go with you unless there’s enough relaxation factored into the whole trip and I said, I already told you that, and he said, well, you know what she’s like, she gets all excited, and I said, we’re going to relax and go for cappuccinos in the little village every morning and I’m going to sing along the way and it’s going to be like the Sound of Music so I’ve got to make my costume I’ve got to go, bye.

People who clip their fingernails on public transit are the bane of my existence. Isn’t it shocking that there has to actually be a category for them? Why is this as common a sighting as it is?

Like today I was on the streetcar, seated next to a lovely young woman who suddenly whipped out the clippers and started in. Some of the clippings fell directly to the floor and some kind of pooled into her lap and every once in a while she would brush them off onto the floor. She was cheerfully and totally oblivious to my unbroken stare of disgust and my passive-aggressive loud sighs. When she was done, and organizing her things, I realized that the clippers were actually attached to her keychain. The horror! Swiss Army Knife? Check. Corkscrew? I can see how it might come in handy. But come on, do you need to clip your nails while on the go so often that you need to carry your tools with you?

I realize that subway cars and buses are by their nature kind of dirty and occasionally someone spills their coffee, but come on, people, work with me. Keep the personal hygiene at home where it belongs.

So the latest outrage on my list is that the International Astronomical Union is acting like this girl I knew in junior high who lived for male attention. She’d stop talking to you mid-sentence if a boy sauntered by. I’m all for a little boy-craziness—okay, a lot—but what I’m trying to say is this girl had no standards. She didn’t discriminate between a pint-sized Johhny Depp and a pint-sized Jeffrey Dahmer (am I spelling that right? I don’t know, but I refuse to google Jeffrey Dahmer). She’d start orbiting around the nearest boy faster than you could say Pluto.

If these astronomical-sluts get their way it’s the end of the solar system as we know it. They’ve decided that a planet is—wait for it—a round thing orbiting a star. That’s like saying that a symphony is something you play on the piano.

There are apparently now 12 planets: we get to keep Pluto and we have to add Ceres (hello, asteroid?), Charon (the planet previously known as a moon of Pluto), and the charmingly-named UB313 (nicknamed Xena, with a moon called Gabrielle, which, okay, I even have to admit is cute).

And of course if we actually apply the new standards, assuming our backs don’t give out as we stoop down to scrape them off the floor, there are around 50 other chunks of cosmic debris out there that qualify as planets. What is this going to do to mnemonic devices everywhere? How am I supposed to take “Mother Visits Every Morning Just Stays Until Noon, Period” and make it work for 50 more planets? And what will this mean for astrology? Am I even still a Capricorn with a moon in Gemini?

Everyone was all worried about Pluto, the “darling of school kids everywhere.” How can they keep Pluto and not add all this other junk, everyone wondered? Screw Pluto, I said. It never counted and “school kids everywhere” could stand a little taste of disappointment. It’s good practice. Pluto never made sense in my mnemonic device anyway.

But, no, the IAU has gone all planet-crazy. Like a hypochondriac who sees germs everywhere, they’re busy rechristening every hunk of rock out there. Apparently the whole body is going to vote on the concept later this week. Let us hope that cooler heads prevail.

Last week (did I bore U with this already?) my sister dragged me 2 Philadelphia, where we saw a hardcore show in an unairconditioned basement where the temperature reached 123 degrees. My sister wrung her shirt out on the sidewalk, and I had an awesome time! Plus I met some hawtt boy with grey eyes (!!!) from a farm, and our hotel had electric wall sconce candelabra over the bed. Otherwise nothing is new cause I’m lame, natch.

Oooh! New slang! My sister got it from an article she was editing! “Monet”, as in someone who is attractive far away, but not so much close up. Usage: “That guy I thought was checking me out at the roller rink turned out 2 B a total monet….among other things.”

So I’ve lately been afraid that I’m in a rut, fiction-wise. I always fret about this as I pick up the latest urban-fiction-written-by 30-something-Canadian-girl, but my latest flare-up started because I got into this thing with a clerk at Book City. I was buying a book of short stories (The Dolphins of Sainte-Marie by Sandra Sabatini, which is the best book of the year and I simply cannot rave about it enough), and he started to take me around the store to “show” me some of his favorite short story collections and I was like, no, no, no thanks, tried it. He started with Alice Munro and Carol Shields and I was like, first of all, do you think I was born yesterday? and second of all, are you kidding me? I was recently forced to read an Alice Munro story and it was about a middle age woman dying of cancer in a small town. She went to visit someone who lived on a farm (why exactly is a little fuzzy) and she got lost in the rows of corn and it was like, a metaphor for her illness and her life. Later, trying to be open-minded, I started Friendship, Courtship, Hateship, or whatever it is called (and you have to admit it’s a brilliant title, even though I can’t get it right) and the opening scene was this spunky early-century woman at the train station inquiring about shipping furniture to Regina or something. And she has to give her address and it’s noted that the houses in town had only recently been numbered. And what is it with Carol Shields and this whole “dropped threads” my-sewing-project-is-doomed metapor for womanhood? Thanks but no thanks.

So I try to say to the guy, I like stories by Barbara Gowdy (because that’s respectable, right?). I also like stories by Russell Smith and this great recent collection by Heather Birrell, who no one has ever heard of. The god of short stories is T.M. McNally. You want to weep from the trueness and perfection of it all when you read him, and, and…

He’s like, who?

This problem also extends to novels. And sometimes I think it’s not really a problem because usually I think, you like what you like, right? The world is too full of too many good books to waste time with anything you don’t love, right? So it’s totally okay to discard out of hands books about: 1) boys, 2) other centuries, 3) economic hardship, and 4) war.

Right?

I don’t know Chicklets. In school they made me read things like The Grapes of Wrath and A Tale of Two Cities, and I loved them. No one is making me do that now. My beef is basically that you have to wade through so many ailing women in corn fields to get to the out-of-your-comfort-zone good stuff that it’s tempting to just not ever branch out.

I was a little alarmed this evening when I was talking to Mr. Mock about What I Was Reading These Days and I pulled out of my bag two books I currently have on the go. They were called:

I never read the business pages. I’m not proud of this. About a year ago I decided to start reading one article from the business section every day. That lasted about a week. So I’m glad Mr. Mock pointed out the most delish article in Monday’s Globe and Mail.

It seems that the second comma in this clause in an agreement between Rogers and another company that is going to put up its cable lines on utility poles is going to cost Rogers $2.13 million:

The agreement shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.

Rogers thought they had locked in a price for the first five years, but no, that last comma gives the other company the right to cancel the agreement with a year’s notice (and then, presumably, raise their rates).

Har! I love this! The meek and yet all powerful punctuation mark brings the titans of business to their knees.

The Longest Telephone Message Ever, from Lulu, whom I’d just seen a couple hours ago and also just spoken on the phone with maybe 30 minutes ago.

Jenny, Jenny, Jenny! It’s me. Anyway, I’m just having a Diet Pepsi waiting for my husband to get home. I’m almost all chatted out but I had to leave you this little message because I knew only you would appreciate it. Okay, so I come home, you call, we talk, blah, blah, blah. I have dinner. I run a bath. My father calls. He leaves a message. I call him back. I’m like, what are you doing? He’s like, I had a busy week. Why? Cause I spent 21,000 dollars. What?! What did you spend all that money on? Oh, I bought a cottage. I’m like, what? A cottage. Acottage for 21 thousand dollars. Anyway, he’s so excited. I’m like, are you kidding me? I couldn’t even buy toilet paper in Toronto for that. Anyway, it’s winterized. The guy sold it with all the furniture and everything in it. And get this, this is he part where you and I would not buy it. It is in the tiniest, tiniest little Newfoundland stereotypical fishing community. But he loves that. When he bought it he slept in it that night. The guy gave him the keys right there on the spot. Everyone came over, they had a barbeque. They all know each other now. They went to buy beer and it’s for sale in some guy’s house. My father knocks and the guy says, what the hell are you doing knocking? Nobody knocks here, man. Anyway, he didn’t say man, they spoke in Newfanese. Anyway, I had to leave you this long message. I’m exhausted and now I’m going to fall asleep. Haaaaaaa! I think we’re going to go Sean’s friend’s cottage tomorrow. I’m kind of excited now that I had that conversation with my father. I’m feeling pretty excited about life. Anyway don’t get all teary eyed caused I’m leaving you a sappy message. Youknew I was excited tonight because when you walked home with me from work I was a big chatterbox and I just need to have a little conversation, even if it’s with myself. [pause] I know you’re laughing at me. [pause] Bye.

Chicklets, it’s finally storming, a giant exhale after a week of alarming weather (Are you there, Kyoto? It’s me Margaret.). I can now speak and write whereas I had until recently been reduced to communicating via sighs and grunts while at home, where the air-conditioner is broken. Food tastes good again. Human contact is tolerable.

The sad result of this molasses heat wave is that I haven’t seen nor spoken to Lily or Lulu so I am sorely lacking in the hijinks department. I will, however, tell you about a bitchin’ press release written by a friend of mine about some research that shows that instant messaging is in fact not threatening teens’ grasp of grammar. It turns out that texting may even make them better grammarians. Who knew? The Toronto Star ran an interesting story on the results.

Dude, I’m so tan that my hands look dirty. U know what I mean? Why? See attached picture. Priestess were playing Coney Island at 1:30 in the afternoon. In the SUN! I literally RAN down the beach 2 shove my way 2 the front row. Whereupon I found that 5’5″ chunky, not-cute-no-matter-how-U-spin-it Mikey Heppner has NATURALLY RED-BLOND ROOTS under his dyed black hair. He was drenched with sweat. He was bright red from the heat. He will never give me the time of day. I heart him! Even though he made me tan!

Someone has stolen my flowerpot, Chicklets. And as much as that seems like it should be a metaphor for something sexual, it’s not. It’s just the hard literal truth. They left the little drainage tray thingy but made off with an entire pot that I had sitting by the gate that marks the beginning of my yard. What is the matter with teenagers these days? Aren’t they busy enough shooting up and giving each other blow jobs between algebra and civics? Oh, wait, they don’t teach civics anymore, that must be the problem…

I know it was Evil Teens that stole my flowerpot, because you hear them at all hours in my neighbourhood, marauding, their pierced chins jutting skyward. I read recently about this device called The Mosquito, which is supposed to repel them by emitting an annoying sound that only teenagers can hear! Can you imagine?

The best part is that the Evil Teens are reappropriating it and using it as a ring tone, so the grown-ups can’t hear their cell phones ringing. I will grudgingly admit that that kind of ingenuity is worth a flowerpot or two.

A CNN breaking news e-mail interrupts my afternoon work to inform me that George W. Bush has just issued the first veto of his administration, striking down legislation that would have legalized the use of embryonic stem cells in federally-funded research. Passed with a clear majority in Congress, lawmakers are still four votes shy of the two-thirds needed to override Bush’s veto.

The irony is that I work in communications in a university research office. The work that CNN has interrupted is a magazine article about — yes — university research, much of it health-related and much of it funded by the taxpayers of Canada through federal granting agencies.

As an American living in Canada, I spend a lot of time fretting about George Bush. Caught somewhere between the reflexive anti-Americanism of most Canadians and my own genuine alarm at many of the policies of the Bush White House, I frequently find myself in the awkward position of being defensive and derisive at the same time.

It’s easy to get worked up about the Bush’s stance on social issues: his opposition to gay marriage, to abortion. But I have to believe that these things will pass, that the tide of public opinion and the march of time will eventually push lawmakers south of the border to do the right thing, to mind their own business and get out of our proverbial bedrooms.

George Bush can be as socially backwards as he wants to for all I care, but it’s the lasting economic damage he’s slyly inflicting on us all — because like it or not, as America goes, so do we — that we’ve got to watch out for.

We’ve all heard that Bush has spent more than twice what Clinton did, not including the military spending that’s sustaining the war in Iraq. We’ve heard that, adjusted for inflation, he’s even outspent LBJ and his Great Society. We’ve heard that the U.S. national debt is flirting with 8 trillion, the surplus years of the Clinton administration only a fond memory now, even as he lowers taxes.

My fear is that this latest move, this veto of embryonic stem cell research, isn’t just about, as Bush said today, preventing us from doing something that “crosses a moral boundary,” it’s about bankrupting us, literally and intellectually.

I’ve read with great unease accounts of scientists who say their work has been censored for political reasons. I was dismayed when Susan Wood, director of the office of women’s health at the FDA, resigned as the emergency contraception pill, approved by the agency, stalled in years of political wrangling by an administration proclaiming its dedication to the so-called culture of life. I was even more distressed when I read that George Deutsch (who, of course, lied on his resume about having a university degree) had “rewritten” NASA accounts the Big Bang to make sure it was clear that it was only a “theory.”

Bush’s latest veto is interpretable on the one hand as merely the latest episode in what’s proving to be a story of breathtaking anti-intellectualism. But on the other hand, might it not have serious economic implications?

Back at work, we talk a lot about research. What good is it? Why should we support it? Just the other day we had a conversation about what “good” the humanities are. Does a novel written by a professor of English deserve the same emphasis as a scientific paper by a geneticist? Being writers, we are all quick to defend the novel’s contribution to humanity. You can’t measure the impact of art, we say.

But you can measure the impact of stem cell research. By all accounts, it’s the next frontier, the microprocessor of our generation. Bush talked about a “moral boundary.” Does he also want to draw a literal boundary around the U.S., so that 20 years down the road, when the rest of us are lining up for our cancer vaccines, the Americans won’t be eligible because they remain committed to a “culture of life?”

The truth is that Bush isn’t interested in life. He’s obsessed with death. All this time and political will devoted to fetuses and embryos and brain dead people like Terri Schiavo seems to leave no time for thinking about the live people he’s actually sworn to protect.

I’m glad Bush finds time, being so busy bankrupting America, to focus on these important moral issues. I’ll remind his great-grandchildren, when they’re part the world’s underclass, eking out a living cleaning the toilets at branches of Bombay-based biotech multinationals, that at least they’re living in a culture that values life.

Well, I went 2 the dentist this week 4 a filling. So, like, as a total dork, when they give U that first really awful shot, I always just pretend I’m making out with some hot boy with fangs, so I don’t pass out. Usually it’s Steve Kilbey from the Church, no prob. So this time I pictured Gerard. 2 minutes later I come out of a white hole in a cold sweat 2 find that this is the first time in TWENTY-FIVE YEARS IN PRACTICE that the dentist has had 2 call 911. I seized up and stopped breathing. Aftermath: they ultimately give me 2 more massive shots cause nothing’s working. I picture Mikey Heppner from Priestess and there’s no problem. Also the ambulance takes AN HOUR. They sent it from Brooklyn cause midtown was booked. So if I hadn’t come 2 Gerard would have killed me. Thanks.
Seriously sick aftermath:I still think he’s the shyt.
Bummed that there’s no one 2 make out with my novocaine lips,
-Lily

Emergency! Lily’s current celebrity crush (and you have to understand that Lily’s celebrity crushes run in long waves. They last years, Chicklets. They are serious commitments) has died his hair blonde.

Yes, Gerrard Way, lead singer of My Chemical Romance, has gone platinum. This has not caused her to ratchet down her devotion even one hair. Ironically, his brother, also in the band, has gone from blonde to black.

I pointed out that Lily has never crushed on anyone with blonde hair, unless you count Legolas, but that’s a whole other story.

When I opened my e-mail account this morning, I had a spam message with “equity report” in the subject line. It was spam! Spam purporting to care about something like equity! I don’t even know where to go with this one. It’s not enough that they have penis enlargers and girls, girls, girls, they have to have equity too?

Here’s an equity report for you: I was thrilled to read about the unveiling of the Clarkson Cup yesterday. It’s the Stanley Cup of women’s hockey, named for former governor-general Adrienne Clarkson, who made it one of her causes. Rock on, Ms. Clarkson.

P.S. I can pretty much guarantee that this is the first and last time this blog will link to The Sports Network.

So, Chicklets, I was cruising around the Internet the other day at work because I needed to find a researcher who was into a particular topic. A false lead brought me to a faculty profile that opened with this line:

Sometimes on my lunch break at work I go read in a science library . It’s attractive because it has nice carrels to sit in near walls of windows and unlike most libraries these days, it’s quiet. To get to my spot, I walk though stacks of periodicals. There are signs on the ends of the shelves that help you orient yourself if you’re looking for journals. But instead of saying J-K and just using the alphabet, they use the actual titles of the journals as breaks. So you get things like:

Journal of Molecular Biology to Kinesiology

My very, very favorite aisle is labelled:

Mutation Research to Observatory

I try to walk down it every time I’m in the library because I think it brings me good luck.

I have this pointless habit of keeping a running to-do list. I guess I must subconsciously enjoy the feeling of never measuring up, because in addition to achievable entries like “buy stamps,” this list also contains things I will never do, things like “organize boxes of loose photos into nice albums” and “make a spreadsheet to track spending.” These are things that annoy me enough be entries on my to-do list but not enough to actually do them. Therefore they are perpetually rolling over onto subsequent to-do lists. I never do them, but I’m constantly reminded that they need doing (masochistic much?).

The point of this all is for you to understand that when I look at my to-do list, I look with a grain of salt (can you look with a grain of salt? Am I mixing my metaphors? More on this later). The best part about revisitng to-do lists is when you can’t figure out what certain entries mean. You probably scrawled them in a hurry, sure that they were so important, so front-of-mind, that your weird shorthand would be enough to trigger your memory. For example, “Internet” obviously means “book the rental car for the Rochester trip but check a few competing websites first.” Duh.

The other day I had one of these moments of confusion. The item in question was “clean desktop.” I’d recently bought a new computer, and some of the items on my to-do list were related to this, I knew. I was supposed to set up bookmarks in my web browser and so on. So I decided that this is what “clean desktop” must refer to. But at the same time, was I on crack because there was nothing on my desktop to clean. Because the computer was new, its desktop had not yet accumulated enough pictures of Lily’s celebrity pretend-boyfriends to require cleaning.

I was sitting at my desk thinking about this and I sighed, resting my chin in my hands. I suddenly realized that my problem was that computers have introduced so many metaphors into our lives so utterly effectively that we have pretty much lost any sense of the actual things these metaphors refer to.

Clean desktop meant just that. Clean desktop. Duh. I had repotted some plants nearby and the top of my desk was dirty. It needed to be cleaned—ironically because I didn’t want my fancy new computer, sitting on my desk, to get dirty.

I remembered once laughing at the metaphors adopted by the computer-universe when I was having technical problems and was suddenly faced with the following error message:

Your system has become vulnerable. Please install the patch for vulnerability.

Not having a vulnearbilty patch on hand, I panicked and shut everything off. Then I started to fantasize: what if there were patches for emotional states like vulnerability, just like they have nicotine patches and those freaky birth-control patches?

She’s crying at her work station again! Get the vulnerability patch, ASAP!

I don’t know, it seems funny, but then I started to think about how it’s only funny if you’re smart enough to have a handle on the fact that we are speaking metaphorically when we’re in the computer-verse. I came pretty close to losing this sense myself, with my confusing “clean desktop” directive.

I’m not sure that computers, with their recycling bins and hourglasses and desktops have really done us any favours, metaphorically speaking.

So remember A.M. Homes? The clever one? The one who writes books about suburban alienation and the millions of modern existential mini-crises that comprise a life? In Music for Torching, the protagonists torch their house one day, wordlessly letting a summer evening barbeque become an inferno, for no apparent reason other than that the ennui was becoming too terrible. There’s a story in the Safety of Objects collection in which the mother keeps her comatose son in bed in his room, pretending that everything is fine, because the alternative is just too terrible. Just too terrible…

Well, Mock Chicken is heartily recommending her latest, This Book Will Save Your Life. One the one hand, it’s what we love from A.M. Homes: spot-on cultural criticism that makes you laugh out loud from the sheer true-ness of it, set in a surreal city-on-overdrive fantasy world where landscapes float past you in their cheerful toxicity.

Except this one’s about becoming happy. The main character, Richard, who’s a soulless day trader living alone in a hermetically sealed mansion-box in the hills above Los Angeles, has a panic-attack sort of medical crisis that is never really explained. This is followed by the sudden appearance of a gigantic sink hole in his yard. He’s scared and so he starts to change things in his life, reaching out to the people he meets as well as the people he already knows and kind of gradually becoming happy. It’s about looking at something that is just too terrible…and fixing it.

Sounds like a self-help book, I know, and the title obviously plays on that notion, but it’s a page-tuner, honest! It’s sly that way. I started wondering if maybe this book had a secret Buddhist agenda, because it’s really about changing the way you look at the world, rather than actually changing the world that you’re looking at. So I asked Lulu (mistress of the 12 Steps to Enlightenment program, you will recall), who read it on the beach on her recent Caribbean vacation, to comment.

It’s about the struggle for inner peace and freedom, about learning to be happy focusing on inner peace and allowing yourself to try different things, not getting set in your ways, and being surprised by the effects of opening up to letting new people into your world.

I loved the ending with him in the middle of the ocean floating on the door—a metaphor for going with the flow and accepting the lessons he had learned over the last few months in his life: no need to stress over things we have no control over. It’s better to live life than hide in our own routine of what’s comfortable. No matter how healthy and careful you are, life is not full hiding from yourself.

He was so free in the end just floating and living. He had created this family of unique individuals who all had brought elements into his world that he was always so afraid of and didn’t even know why he was so afraid of.

As the books moves forward it almost seems like he chose to remember his life, childhood, marriage and relationships a certain way. Once he starts living a little more and letting go of his routine and selfish environment he starts to see things the way the really are and were.

It just doesn’t seem right that I forgot to tell you about the best art exhibition I’ve seen in a long time. I’m only telling you now that it’s closed and you can’t go. I’m only telling you now because I randomly found photo of it. It just isn’t fair. It’s almost mean.

So it turns out there’s this craft called lace draping, where you take figurines—you know, like cute girls with baskets of flowers—and drape them with lace. The lace has been saturated in liquid porcelain and then you fire the whole thing in a kiln so the lace burns off and you’re left with what looks like delicate lace but is actually solid porcelain. So you might give a girl a lace dress or shawl or something. The effect is very fussy and dainty.

This local woman named Sharry Boyle had a small exhibition at the Power Plant this spring. Lulu and I went after work on the free day (Wednesdays, Chickets). (We actually went to see the marquee exhibition, The Welfare Show, which I could also highly recommend in retrospect, but that’s another overdue story. I will tell you that the first installation in this show consisted of a hallway-like room with lots of doors that don’t open. Most people are probably smart enough to understand that they’re fake doors and to deduce that the whole point is that they go nowhere, that the world is inaccessible to lots of people and so on. Lulu and I were not smart enough and so we spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to open the doors and going, OMG, is this all there is? We then went and asked Mean Art Girl behind the front desk and she snootily told us that that was only the first installation and sniffed as she pointed in the other direction, where the rest of the exhibition was behind a corner. Then we went around the corner and there was a fake dead body on a hospital gurney that looked so real that we started screaming and then laughing. Whatever.)

So tacked onto the end of the big show are a couple little glass cases of these lace draped figurines. They’re all perfect little Victorian girls with flouncy dresses and bonnets, except soon you begin to notice there’s something slightly wrong with them. One of them is all bruised, big purple botches all over her white skin. And then, OMG, it gets worse/better. Some of the girls are missing limbs and have only bloody stumps. One of them is holding her own decapitated head.

It’s thoroughly satisfying, I think, because it’s such an unlikely juxtaposition: such dainty perfect girls made with such painstaking and careful technique, yet they’re such a collection of gory morbidity. Kind of like taking a thematic interpretation of whatever you decide you want the “topic” to be—the feminine ideal, Victorian repression, beauty—and making it literal. Lovely. I’d like Mean Art Girl at the front desk to think of something so bitchin’.

1) Find attached a photo of Gerard sans gear and dye: he’s still hawtt and it’s obvious he must have been human at some point. MayB there’s still hope 4 gearless, dyeless goth me when he eventually returns 2 his natural state!

2) My skin medicine is working. Keep yr fingers crossed.

3) The bus came when I got 2 the stop! W-O-W!

4) Most valid proof: THEY R POURING WET CEMENT IN FRONT OF MY HOUSE. I’m waiting 2 hours till its dark, and then I’m going down there with a screwdriver and going apeshit.

Then, today, from Lily:

Subject: Proof there is no God.

1) That fucking cement was fucking Kwikdry and it fucking fucked me.

2) I spent THREE HOURS struggling up 2 City College 4 one lousy record -40 minutes waiting 4 the bus. Bus breaks down. Wait 4 second bus with a preteen who asks if I sleep in a coffin. Second bus comes. Arrive train station. Uptown train shut. Take downtown train. Take express uptown back up past local stops. Take local train BACK dowtonwn 2 hit missed stop. Tromp up world’s steepest hill in SUNLIGHT WITH NO SUNSCREEN – and when I got there…..the building had been bulldozed. It was literally a pile of rubble with the bulldozer still sitting on it.

3) I just threw out all that perfectly good generic Nyquil 2 prove I’m not addicted 2 it 3 days ago. Now I have a cold.

My latest 60-second crush is Ricky Williams. Yes, Ricky Williams, the latest player for the Toronto Argonauts. Suspended from the NFL for failing drug tests in 2004, he retired and backpacked through Asia anonymously. Now he’s signed for CDN $250,000 with the local CFL team for a fraction of his $5-million (U.S.) NFL salary.

Why do we love Ricky? Let us count the ways.

1. He’s a yogi! He’ll be teaching yoga three days a week in the mornings before practice. And he’ll be doing it for free because he believes in karma.

2. I heard him on the radio the other day and they asked him if being suspended from the NFL was a big blow. He said nope because “football is just what I do, it’s not who I am.”

3. When asked in another interview if he was worried that people would think he quit so he could smoke dope, he said, “I try not to get too involved in what other people think of me.”

Okay, not. But they have an indirect effect, it seems, according to a new study about the power of fatherhood on congressmen and male senators written about in the June 2006 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

A professor at Yale figured out that there’s a link between having daughters and voting in liberal on “women’s issues,” which are defined as a collection of issues ranging from abortion to education.

“The higher the proportion of female children in a U.S. congressman’s family, the more likely he was to lean left on these issues—that is to have a higher NOW [that’s National Organization for Women, Chicklets] score and a lower NRLC [that’s the National Right to Life Committee] score.”

This apparently holds true across party lines, although I guess George W. is bucking the trend. I guess he’s just not imaginative enough to see the world from Barbara and Jenna’s perspective. Because, you know, imagination requires you to like, have a grasp of the metaphorical and to at least temporarily abandon literalism and single-mindedness.

What’s really interesting is that the so-called “daughter gap” is at its widest when we’re talking specifically about abortion and contraception. The relationship between having daughters and having a liberal voting record was strongest in the case of these issues.

It’s old news by now so I’m assuming we’ve all read “Contra Contraception” from the May 7 New York Times Magazine by now? If not, you’re behind on your homework, Chicklets.

Turns out the new frontier among the “we like to say we want the government off your backs but what we really mean is we want no taxes but reserve the right to dictate what goes on in your private life” conservatives is the anti-contraception movement. And, no, we’re not talking about abortion, we’re talking about good old fashioned birth control. You know, what they used to call “family planning” when we were in school.

The Republicans, it seems, just don’t want birth control around any more. And no, they don’t just mean they don’t want your kids labeling confusing abstract diagrams of fallopian tubes in school. They mean they don’t want it around at all. Like, throw those condoms away and stop taking your pills because using birth control makes you “anti-child.” And dooms you to hell for all eternity, natch. No, I’m not making this up.

In an 8,000 word tour de force, Russell Shorto infiltrates the movement, which not only includes fringy wackos organized into various leagues for the protection of the rights of the sperm, but, scarily, government officials like the anti-birth control Joseph Stanford, whom Bush appointed to the FDA’s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee (because you know, appointing someone who opposes birth control to a committee whose function is supposed to be only to rule on the safety of drugs makes so much sense), who said that excluding the potential of fertility from sex means that spouses begin to see each other as sources of sexual pleasure; sex becomes separated from procreation. And that’s bad, Chicklets! Bad! (Keep up with the class.)

Never mind that these people have blood on their hands in a big big way since they’re responsible for exporting the Bush administration’s abstinence only curriculum to AIDS relief programs in Africa.

But kids, my fave outrage of the many Shorto catalogs is the Purity Ball. Put on by various groups, these balls are attended by teenage girls and their fathers. “At the ball, a father gives a ‘purity ring’ to his daughter—a symbol of the promise she makes to maintain her virginity for her future husband. Then during her marriage ceremony, the daughter gives the ring to her new husband.” Gag me with a double standard.

All we can do is hope that all those purity pledges backfire (as apparently they often do: the pure kids apparently have way more sex than the ones who didn’t promise nuthin’ to no one, say the stats).

Let’s close our eyes, click our heels together three times, and pray to the gods of Kobol that those poor girls all turn out to be lesbian Wiccan social workers who dedicate their lives to organizing political campaigns for the Green party.

Seriously, you should read the article. Or if 8,000 words is just about 7,500 too many, go read Dan Savage’s excellent recap. He frames the whole thing as a straight-rights issue: having been agitating and insisting that straight people’s rights are coming under attack, our fave gay sex columnist saw this coming way before anyone else did.

You thought contraception was pretty well a settled issue didn’t you? Thought you maybe had to keep track of what those Republicans were doing in sex ed courses and abortion clinics. Turns out you’d better watch your back.

I ran in2 this girl I know who used 2 work at 8th street Lab, but now works at Yellow Rat Bastard. She was going 2 get free drinks where her former high school counselor was bartending. Considering she just graduated, I was impressed.

My sister e-mailed recently with the earth-shattering news that there is a teacher at our old high school named Jennifer Hall, which is, of course, my name. It turns out she even teaches geography, which is, of course, what I studied. It’s possible that she’s an alternate version of me (or I’m an alternate version of her). Imagine if I’d moved back to Minnesota after my master’s in geography, as planned. What would I have done? Probably kicked around for a while aimless until I decided to suck it up and go to teachers’ college. And wouldn’t it be ironic that I’d end up teaching at my old high school? I shall think of this Jennifer Hall every time I get grumpy. As we like to say in Minnesota, it could be worse.

Once I got an e-mail out of the blue from a Jennifer Hall who was looking for another Jennifer Hall, but I was not the Jennifer Hall she wanted, it turned out. She was Jennifer Hall who went by Jen and she had been born, she said, in the same hospital on the same day as the other Jennifer Hall, who actually went by Jennifer. They’d been in touch for part of their lives and now Jen was looking for Jennifer. Was I her? Alas, I was not.

Mr. Mock thought that since we were Jennifer, Jenny, and Jen Hall, perhaps we could form a crime-fighting syndicate. I thought this an excellent idea and imagined that we could wear disco outfits whilst vanquishing evil, and even suggested it, but Jen Hall wasn’t interested.

Lulu sends her regards. While she and her husband are cavorting in paradise this week, Mr. Mock and I have moved into their condo to take care of their cat Mr. Leonard and to facilitate some repairs at our place that will render our bathroom unusable for a week.

I’m a pedestrian in suburbia this week, Chicklets. Off work, I’m just puttering around, hanging with Leonard. So the other day I thought I’d walk to a nearby mall because I’m in need of some lady clothes for work. It’s a ten-minute walk and yet it isn’t meant to be walked. Semis come barreling off the highway ramp that feeds into the arterial you’re strolling along. Then at one point, the mall in your sights, the sidewalk ends and you have to walk along these grassy embankment thingys. It was quite an adventure.

It also turns out there’s a conspiracy among the second run and art house cinemas to not have matinees any more. The only movies you can see at one o’clock are blockbusters. Who knew?

I went to the mall yesterday and as I was standing in line to pay for my black and white diagonal striped skirt that looked exactly like something I would have worn to a school dance in 1985, David Bowie’s Space Oddity came on the Muzak. Then when I got to the front a teenager named Britney whose name tag said she had “served two years” asked me if the gray streak in my hair was natural. It was, I said. “Awesome,” she said.

Are we all getting excited for the season finale of the Gilmore Girls tomorrow night, Chicklets? (You did realize that The Gilmore Girls is the official television show of Mock Chicken, didn’t you? Catch up with the class…)

And I’m not even embarrassed. Yes, everyone thinks GG is made for the tween set. Yes, everyone’s always talking about how family friendly it is (a humorous multigenerational story about family, friends and the ties that bind, said one guide I read. Gag me.) I guess it is family-and-tween-friendly, on one level, because the main character is a smartypants who likes to hang out with her mother. But really, are fans of the Olsen twins getting all the rapid-fire feminist and 80s pop culture references? Do they care that Sebastian Bach from Skid Row has a recurring role as a bandmember of Lane’s and that he’s basically cheerfully doing a parody of himself? Do they appreciate that Madeline Albright and Norman Mailer have had cameos? Did they love when Rory and her mom went to see the Bangles? No, I think not. I read a critic lately who said that Lorlei Gilmore is a modern day Dorothy Parker and I think it is only a slight exaggeration.

And yes, we know it’s all self-conscious and performey: that’s part of its charm. Can anyone say Dawson’s Creek?

And do I need to point out that GG is the only show I can think of that is explicitly about class, which supposedly does not exist in America? Think about it: Lorelei’s perpetual feuds with her mother and Rory’s fish-out-of-water in private school thing. (Or come on, at least give it points for trying to be about class. I guess it’s not like Rory and Lorelei are really slumming it over at the Dragonfly Inn, but I digress.)

I read somewhere that the scripts for GG are twice as thick as for other hour-long shows because they all talk so fast. And isn’t that really what we love about it? Don’t we all wish we were as smart as Lorelei? Don’t we think it would be great to have such a fast-talking, wise-cracking best friend? Oh, wait…

I am partial to fast talkers.

So anyway, watch and enjoy because the kids are all saying that creator Amy Sherman-Palladino is leaving the show over differences with the network, so tomorrow is pretty much the last episode left before things really start to suck. You know, Rory will graduate from Yale and take a job as the editor of a teen magazine and the show will spin off into a half-hour sitcom about the zany antics of Rory and her fashionista friends in the big city. Meanwhile, the network will start licensing a Dragonfly Inn line of home and body care products.